


The Root and the Stalk

by the1918



Series: Song of the Rolling Earth [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftercare, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Anal Training, Anger and Confusion Due to Lying, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky Is 25, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Daddy Kink, Domestic Bliss, Emotional Sex, Farmer Steve Rogers, Guilt, Homophobia, Hyperspermia, Identity Reveal, Large Cock, Loss of Virginity, Love Confessions, M/M, Modern Bucky Barnes, Past Abuse, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Retired Steve Rogers, Rimming, Sex Toys, Shrunkyclunks, Size Difference, Size Kink, Steve Rogers is Not a Virgin, Steve is 40, Stomach Distension, Top Steve Rogers, Twink Bucky Barnes, Virgin bucky barnes, Virginity Kink, daddy Steve Rogers, homophobic parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:48:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29385129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the1918/pseuds/the1918
Summary: “My mom, she’s not perfect, but she always had this one saying. You can’t look right into the sunset, because the light will burn your eyes. So you have to face east, right?” Bucky tucks his forehead against Steve’s chest, staring down the gap between them, eyes on their feet. “And when you do, you can look at the ground, and you can see your own shadow.”Bucky raises his head after a contemplative silence and gazes up at Steve. Those stormy gray eyes are filled with luminance, iridescence, splintered rays of shining light.“Or—Mom would say—you can look in front of you.” His lashes kiss his cheeks in butterfly pulses every time he blinks. “And ‘God’s light at your back will show you everything.’”—The AU Farmer Daddy Steve and Bucky story.part:|one|two|three|f o u r|five|
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Song of the Rolling Earth [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2050335
Comments: 410
Kudos: 619





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ixalit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ixalit) for beta and to Cera ([@ceratonia-siliqua](https://ceratonia-siliqua.tumblr.com/) or [Leopardtail](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leopardtail) on Ao3) for additional sensitivity reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Past Abuse Warning (New Tag):** This chapter includes brief, non-graphic episode of physical abuse of an adult by a homophobic parent. If you think you might want to skip this scene, please visit the end chapter notes for details and skip instructions.

* * *

**b u c k y**

_Bucky Barnes is eight years old the first time he sees a grainy, black and white picture of Captain America. It’s printed in a big, hardback book with lots of glossy pages, something he pulls down from the shelf in his third-grade classroom. He sounds out “Howlies” and he giggles because it reminds him of his dog._

_He is ten years old when he goes as Cap for Halloween. He gets more peanut butter cups from his neighbors than he ever has before._

_Bucky is fourteen—or is he thirteen?—when he turns in a six-page book report on the European theater in the Second World War with an entire section written about the P.O.W. rescue in Azzano, Italy. He’s sure that he’s aced it, but Mrs. Johnson marks him down to a ‘C+’ and returns it to him with sprawling scratches in red pen all over his favorite parts, and then a frowning face accompanies a comment:_ ‘Injecting too much of your own voice. The assignment was not to offer your personal opinion on Captain Rogers’s prowess in strategic thinking.’

_He is seventeen years old when he reads the flashing news headlines about what the government has found in the Arctic. Not two months later, Bucky’s parents push him and Becca into the basement, desperately shouting at them to kneel and pray until they are told to stop. Mom and Pops kneel next to them and recite their favorite verses from the Bible in panicked, whispering voices, and Bucky makes himself look compliant and busy by mouthing the lyrics of whatever pop songs show up in his head. He keeps one eye open all the while so he can watch the team of superheroes on the television’s live news feed dash across the Manhattan skyline, terrifying beings straight out of a science fiction novel beating them to shit while they try their level best to save the whole world._

_Bucky is twenty when he sees a picture snapped by a journalist of Captain America returning from Sokovia. He is also twenty when he closes his eyes in bed and thinks of a broad man with a dirty, torn suit and dried blood and sweat on his face._

_He is twenty-three when his mother starts screaming and crying—and then he isn’t twenty-three, but ash._

_He is twenty-three when he next opens his eyes. His sister—five years Bucky’s junior—is also twenty-three._

Bucky Barnes is twenty-five when he meets his lifelong hero and idol.

His hero likes to lie.

—

o c t o b e r 2 0, 2 0 2 5

| 238 days until harvest |

Bucky runs.

His boots get caught in the freshly-wet mud, sticking to his soles and sucking him in, but he uses all the strength he has to struggle past it. He has his eyes on his destination—the house, not more than two hundred yards away—but the fastest path there means Bucky won’t make it alone.

Bucky still tries.

Even with the tears clouding his vision, he can see Steve’s eyes go wide across the gradually shrinking distance between them. Steve takes off in his direction to meet him, running probably ten times faster than Bucky does because that’s something Steve can do.

“Buck! What’s wrong? What did you—”

Bucky doesn’t stop running, but he can’t take his eyes off Steve’s face. He can tell that Steve thinks Bucky is sprinting into his arms instead of desperately praying he can evade him, and all Bucky can think about is that Steve dares to assume Bucky would find comfort there; that Bucky will trust him to ease the pain.

Bucky won’t. Steve is the one who has caused this pain. Steve is the reason for the feeling in his heart.

Steve tries to catch him and wrap him up in his arms, but Bucky surprises him, jerking away and not allowing himself to be held back. He’s lucky when the struggle shocks Steve so much that he lets Bucky go, and then Bucky has made it—he’s _gone_. Bucky is home free unless Steve chases after him.

 _“Bucky!”_ Steve shouts _—someone_ shouts, a man with Steve’s face as a mask, an actor playing a character pasted together from pieces Bucky should have recognized. He doesn’t know whether to believe the lilt of pain in that voice.

Bucky doesn’t turn back.

He somehow makes it upstairs without hearing Steve follow him into the house. Bucky shuts his bedroom door, turning a lock he hasn’t used since his first night staying there.

 _Not that it would matter,_ he thinks to himself. Steve—if he’s who he doesn’t say he is—could get through the door without breaking a sweat. Bucky doesn’t think he would, but that’s the thing: he doesn’t know.

Because Bucky doesn’t know _Steve_.

He’s still catching his breath when he hears the loud banging of the screen door opening and closing. The sound of muddy, boot-clad feet dashing up the stairwell follows.

“Buck!” Steve calls, not sounding even halfway short of breath despite the fact that he must have just run over three football fields.

The footsteps stop just outside of Bucky’s door, but to his relief—but not surprise, not really—Steve doesn’t kick the door down. He doesn’t even twist the knob. The body on the other side is quiet for a while, but Bucky can tell Steve doesn’t move. There’s a sound like maybe he’s sat himself down against the wall in the hallway.

“Buck, I… If you come out, I can explain—”

“—Don’t give me a fucking condition,” Bucky spits through the door. His voice is venom, but his muscles are shaky and unsteady. His foundation’s been shaken, his piers collapsed. “Who are you?”

Bucky doesn’t plan to ask it, but now that the small element of fear for his safety is all but gone from his chest, all he lets himself focus on now is his burning hot anger. The doubt and confusion will have to wait for a time when he doesn’t feel like he’s fighting against his own foolishness to keep dignity alive.

“I’m _Steve,”_ comes the imploring answer, fractured already.

Bucky laughs. The sound is as dry and cracked as his lips.

“Steve who?”

There’s a long, loud sigh from the hallway outside. Bucky doesn’t know what to make of it. He’s asked Steve to declare himself—to finally tell him who he is—but Steve has done nothing but remain silent. Bucky doesn’t know if he should count it as a new lie or a continuation of the first, but either way, the only obvious truth coming through from that hallway is that Steve doesn’t think he’s someone worth sharing his name with. 

“Buck, I won’t hurt you. I never will.” Steve sounds like he might actually have tears in his eyes, but Bucky doesn’t know if he believes that’s even possible for this stranger. “Please, just… Please open up. You can ask me anything. I promise I won’t lie.”

 _That’s a fat fucking lie on its own,_ Bucky doesn’t say, because he stays silent; he’s done with this conversation. He has nothing more to add.

Another five minutes pass until he hears Steve sigh again, and this time it sounds like he’s getting up. There is the thud of his footsteps as he disappears down the hall before descending over the creaky floorboards of the old, wooden stairs.

Bucky curls up in a ball in the center of the mattress. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, opening the internet browser.

It’s not that it’s never occurred to him that Steve looks like… _someone;_ Bucky has just never put very much thought into it. For as much as he’d harbored a fascination with Captain America when he’d been younger—and certainly an unabashed admiration of his body once he’d grown older—he’d never really memorized the Legendary Cap’s face the way that he’d done for cute members of boy bands. His self-hatred is boiling over now; he feels like a fucking idiot for not noticing the obvious.

An image search seems like the easiest place to start. He searches for ‘Captain America,’ but all he finds is results for Sam Wilson. Of course.

He changes his Google search to ‘Steve Rogers,’ and then to ‘Captain America Steve Rogers,’ to a variation of someone’s truth—and he gets it. It’s there.

It’s all right fucking _there,_ one click away on a search engine, and that’s where it’s been all along. It’s in the same place it would have been from day one if only Bucky had thought to open his eyes and look. 

Bucky scrolls, again and again. The pictures never change no matter how much the doubt in his chest is crushing him. He’s trying desperately to convince himself that maybe this is all a misunderstanding, maybe the look-alikes are just a coincidence, maybe Steve is just a big Cap fan himself holding onto an old, broken replica of the shield when he scrolls past a close up of Steve Rogers’s face. He would know that green-speckled blue in his dreams.

Well.

Bucky has always wondered if Steve would be as handsome without his beard.

The rest of the day passes with Bucky lying still on his bed. The sun drops low in the sky outside before disappearing behind the distant Brown County hills completely. Steve comes by three more times: the first time to tell him that dinner is ready, the second to leave him food when he gets no response on the first, and the third time to pick up his untouched plate.

Bucky is only glad for the final visit. He doesn’t want mice in the house.

—

_Bucky Barnes is twenty-five when he meets Steve Rogers. It’s raining when it happens._

_He’s in a hospital room, lying on the bed. This man—this_ Steve, _this stranger from a safe corner of the world—is sitting in an ugly pink chair on the other side of the room._

_Bucky is on the couch in a stranger’s home, nestled inside this new, safe place. There’s a sling on his arm. He is an outcast from God’s land, he remembers being told not so long ago, which is just as well. The land outside Steve’s living room window looks like it has never seen God at all._

_He knows kindness: once, and then twice, and then more times than he can count._

_He knows an interlude, maybe more, away from fear and confusion. He knows something that feels like love._

_Earth turns; thunder breaks. The rain comes for him again, and this time it’s here to bless them both._

_Does this Steve only tell the truth when water is falling from the sky?_

_What would he have done if it had never rained?_

—

It’s bright out today. Bucky knows this, because he opens his eyes today the same way he’d done yesterday, and then the day before.

He opens his eyes in the same bed as yesterday, but in a different home.

—

Bucky has spent so much of the past two days being treated like… a boy. He’d loved every minute; the freedom, the safety in letting go of control.

But Steve already said that everything they did would be up to Bucky. He wonders if the person that told him that still exists, if he was ever real, and if Steve Grant’s promise extends outside the bedroom. He wonders if he can leave this room right now and break pattern and fall free and demand that Steve look him in the eye like he’s a _man_ and be honest with him—for once.

Bucky doesn’t know what to expect as he pads down the stairs in loose joggers and one of his own t-shirts. He’s shaking. Steve’s bedroom door had been wide open when he’d passed it, telling Bucky it was probably empty, but he doesn’t find Steve in the living room either. He stops at the bottom of the stairwell, scanning the broader layout of the house. He finds the man he’s searching for.

Steve—Bucky doesn’t know what else to call him—is sitting at the kitchen table. He sees Bucky before Bucky sees him.

The wooden chair scrapes against the tile as Steve pushes it out quickly and stands. Bucky takes a deep breath, and he starts walking his direction, knowing he can’t avoid this conversation any longer.

“Buck…”

Steve looks awful; he looks another ten years older with those dark circles under his eyes. He’s wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when Bucky last saw him, and he wonders if Steve has slept at all.

Bucky doesn’t respond to the broken greeting of his name. Instead, he walks closer, but he finds he can’t make himself do anything further. He wants to be standing; he wants Steve to sit. It’s the only way he’s going to feel like he has any sort of control over this situation.

He nods in the direction of the table and crosses his arms over his chest.

Steve understands. He sits back down in his chair, lacing his fingers together and folding them against the edge of the tabletop.

“Tell me who you are.”

Bucky’s own voice sounds hollow in his ears. He hadn’t planned this; he hadn’t thought out how this would go, or what he would ask, or what answers he wanted to hear.

“I’m Steve,” comes the simple response, and raw anger flares in Bucky’s chest. “You know me.”

“Oh—I do?” Bucky can’t help the spit of sarcasm; it’s all he’s got to protect himself right now. “Okay. What’s your last name, _Steve?”_

Steve’s pause is long and heavy. It hurts inside Bucky’s ears, and the length of it must be exhausting for them both.

“Rogers.”

The answer comes out flat, as though Steve is telling Bucky what’s for dinner. His tone should make it feel almost unimportant, because Bucky had thought he’d already known what Steve was going to say, but it comes as a punch to his gut nonetheless.

He feels stupid. He wants so badly to cry.

“Are you Captain America?” Bucky asks, unable to hide the quaking in his voice.

Steve flinches. Bucky wonders when the last time was that someone asked him that question. He wonders even more when the last time was that Steve answered that question honestly, or if lying about it is wrong of Steve in the first place. Maybe Bucky is just being too childish; too sensitive.

“I was,” Steve answers. “I’m not anymore.”

“But you were the first.”

Steve breathes in and squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them on the exhale, they are big and wide and blue and beseeching. The chair creaks under Steve’s weight when he leans over the table, like it’s of significant importance if he’s three inches closer to where Bucky stands.

“Buck, I…” Steve starts, and the sound of the nickname is also a plea. “I promise I have never lied to you about anything but my last name.”

Bucky laughs, once. The sound of it is dry and loud and full of hysterically disguised insecurity, bouncing off the kitchen tile. It’s more like a bark than anything else.

“Well, that’s bullshit,” he sneers, unable to help himself. “You told me you learned about the Dust Bowl in school. Didn’t mention you lived through it.”

Steve is quiet at first. He doesn’t deny Bucky’s point, because there’s no reason to.

And Bucky has heard enough. He’s had his confirmation, and he doesn’t think he can handle any more of it now that he knows exactly what’s been going on in this house.

“My name is Steven Grant Rogers,” Steve says anyway, speaking slowly, something that _sounds_ like truth dripping from his words, but Bucky doesn’t know if he knows truth well enough to recognize it anymore. “I was born in Brooklyn on—

“—on Independence Day, nineteen-eighteen,” Bucky interrupts, looking Steve hard in the eyes to keep his own voice from shaking. “You were a hundred pounds soaking wet when you joined the Army. You were Captain of the Howling Commandos in World War II. You’ve saved the world more times than—”

“Not the world,” Steve corrects, demeanor suddenly changed, grave. His face and tone are made from concrete and steel. “And not you. You, Buck…” His jaw twitches, a tick of movement in their shared space. “You, I failed.”

Bucky feels like he’s been turned upside down all over again. He doesn’t know what Steve’s words are supposed to mean; all he knows is that it sounds like complicated Avengers shit that he can’t dwell on at the moment, not when he’s got a more pressing question that needs answering. It might be the only question that matters. 

“Why?”

Bucky knows that his meaning is well understood. He watches Steve hear him, and he watches it _click_ , and then Steve’s face is softening under gravity and the weight of the question.

“Why didn’t I tell you?” Steve says.

It’s a pointless clarification. Bucky nods anyway, but he doesn’t breathe. He needs to hear the answer more than he needs air right now.

“I didn’t know how,” comes the answer. The sincerity sounds real, but it doesn’t make anything easier for Bucky. “I didn’t know _when._ I’ve spent so long trying to hide who I am, to blend in. At first, I never thought to do anything else. I thought I would only have you for a couple of months. I couldn’t risk it.” He looks down at his folded hands. “I know I should have told you the minute I asked you to stay—”

“Or the minute you let me crawl into your bed?”

“Especially then,” he answers. His voice sounds like gravel. “I have wanted you for so long, Buck. Not just to share your intimacy, but your friendship. Your intelligence. Your jokes.” Steve smiles, something broken and just as out of place as it also belongs. “I didn’t want to risk losing that.”

It takes everything Bucky has to not give in and melt and run forward into Steve’s arms. They’re not open now, but he knows they would be the second Bucky were to move a muscle.

The thing is that—as much as he wants to be angry at Steve and rail against his explanation and seethe with rage—Bucky understands some parts of what Steve is trying to say. It makes perfect sense for a retired superhero trying to hide his identity to keep that secret, or at least, it _had_ made sense when Bucky was nothing more than a dumb kid; a temporary houseguest. Bucky supposes he would have done the same were he ever in Steve’s shoes.

But there’s another layer to it. Bucky knows what it’s like to have to hide who he is from the people closest to him. He knows what it is to want to tell someone something so central as his identity, but not being able to do so without sacrificing peace and safety. Bucky had thought that keeping himself in the closet was the hardest secret that he ever could have kept. He’s never imagined having to shoulder a secret like this.

It’s confusing—suffocating, almost—to feel his own confusion over being lied to while simultaneously understanding in his bones Steve’s vital requirement to become the liar. All he can do now is ask questions and listen.

“You said that you didn’t save me,” Bucky finds himself saying. He wants to know a lot of things now; why Captain America moved to Indiana—of all places—and bought a damn farm, why he passed the shield to begin with. But there’s another question burning on his tongue, and he’s unsure of where else to go until he asks it. “What did you mean by that?”

Steve changes so quickly that it’s almost scary. His face becomes a storm cloud, but then he draws into himself, a huge man made tiny and small. It’s fascinating —for a multitude of reasons Bucky can’t define in words—and it is absolutely heartbreaking. Steve becomes a person made of stone and edges and rough, coarse gray, and he does it all right in front of Bucky’s eyes.

This isn’t a gruff, brooding farmer coming around the corner out of nowhere. This isn’t Steve Grant, and it’s not the Steve Rogers Bucky thought he might know. Bucky doesn’t know this person.

“The Snap,” Steve answers. “I could have stopped it.”

Bucky’s heart drops into the cold bottom of his gut.

According to his mother, it was his face that disappeared first. Bucky can remember the early sounds of the news anchors falling apart on the television, and he remembers feeling the same panic that had set in during the attack on Manhattan six years prior. What Bucky doesn’t remember is anything that came after, because Bucky didn’t exist.

But in _this_ ‘after’—in this year everyone lives in, what Bucky has learned to call ‘now’—he’s found that the people like himself who were erased by a strange, alien lord who came from Jupiter’s rings think about the Blip differently than those who were left… well. To wander within the dust.

It had taken a lot of people explaining things to him for a long time, but Bucky has come to understand what happened to him and why these people that were there—right in front of him—only seconds ago are now five years older and look like they’ve been carved hollow by something like the shadow of loss. Bucky understands now that he didn’t die, and he didn’t come back to life; he simply became the opposite of infinite, while half of all others continued down their path between zero and one.

He understands these things because people have told him—not because he existed to know things. The only thing Bucky thinks he might remember from his time when memory was as much made of ash as was his flesh is knowing the truth about what lies within stars, and that God wasn’t a part of it.

And now Bucky is looking at Steve Rogers, and he realizes he knows none of that at all.

“I wasn’t here,” is what he says once he finds the voice hiding in his throat. “But people told me. Thanos, right?” He waits until Steve is done cracking around at his knuckles to continue. “The things he had the power to do… Steve. No one could have stopped that.”

Now it’s Steve’s turn to create silence. Bucky stares at his face and watches as it moves through one hundred different emotions, none of them graceful, all of them dark, and it’s like Bucky is watching a picture of hate.

It’s the worst of humanity. It’s inside Steve as much as it’s inside the depths of himself, but its histories look different.

“The first time he came to Earth,” Steve starts, jaw set, now gripping the edge of the table without looking at Bucky, “he already had five of the six Stones. We had the last one. We were the only thing standing between him and erasing half of all life in the universe.”

There’s a lull in Steve’s speech. Bucky takes the opportunity to make himself a part of it, to make Steve feel like maybe he’s got one last teammate, even if he doesn’t know yet how they go forward from today.

“He came to Wakanda, right?”

Steve doesn’t look at him. He does nod.

“That was where the last Stone was. I know. I’m the one who brought it there. Thousands of Wakandan soldiers died before he even snapped his fingers.” Steve raises his eyes. “And they didn’t come back when you did, Buck.”

It’s possibly the coldest chill that’s run down Bucky’s spine today. He’d known there must have been a struggle—that the Avengers had tried—but it’s never crossed Bucky’s mind that real humans tried en force to save Bucky and half of the rest of existence from disappearing. It’s never occurred to him that people with lives and loves and passions died to prevent that from happening.

It’s occurred to Steve. In more ways than one, it was Steve who lost.

“All of us were so tired,” Steve starts, stormy. Bucky knows instantly that he’s about to hear Steve say things he’s never spoken aloud to another living person. “Those monsters had been tearing us apart for hours before he even showed up. One minute we were fighting, and the next minute everything just went… quiet. We—me, my team—we were on the edge of this tree line when the wind changed, but it wasn’t like it shifted from east to west, more like…” Steve stops for a long beat, and Bucky holds his breath. “More like it shifted from pressing down over the hills to pressing down on the backs of our necks—no matter which way you were looking. And then there was this cloud, like a raincloud but darker, and instead of rain inside there were these little black specks you just knew were from the other side of the universe. The air sparked _.”_ Steve falls quiet, looking down at his hands. “And then Thanos walked out.”

There is no part of Bucky that knows how to react to Steve’s account. There is no experience he can use to relate, no memory that bears similarity. He’s still left with nothing to do but to listen.

He walks forward and pulls out a chair, and he sits, making himself level with Steve at the kitchen table. Steve’s eyes don’t move from his own clenched fists.

“I ran at him,” Steve says. “I watched him melt rock. He moved the atoms in my body and tossed them at the ground like he was the one who had made them to begin with. And then, just once, I caught his punch. He was almost to Vision—to the final Stone, and God, his face… I remember it so well. He seemed confused by my strength. He could have used any one of those Stones to throw me off again, but he didn’t. It was like he was fascinated by me. I’ve never had to work the serum harder than I did in that moment. He must have grown bored of me eventually because he finally did throw me away. Didn’t use a Stone, though. He clocked me dead to the ground. Would have been dead if not for the serum.”

Steve looks more than haunted. He looks cracked; infected. Hurt. Bucky watches as he runs his fingertips over the chips in the paint on the table.

“We tried. Again and again. Even Thor couldn’t stop him.” Steve’s fists curl again into two useless-looking knots. “And then he…”

Something changes inside Bucky’s chest, watching Steve, and then that new, changed thing breaks. He can’t take it anymore.

He reaches across the table and stops Steve—Steve Rogers, Steve Grant, any version of Steve who still needs him—with a hand on his forearm.

“Steve, you…” Bucky says, not knowing exactly where he’s going but knowing that he needs to be in the middle of this. To Steve, he already is. “I’m glad to know who you are now, what you’ve lived through. But…” He draws in a deep breath. “But you don’t owe it to me to relive it.”

Steve finally looks up. His eyes—for all that they are blue like the atmosphere—are full of earth and salt. Infected wound or not, Bucky knows he’s looking at a man who has finally found the courage to live without the lie.

“I’d do anything for you,” Steve says.

Bucky lets out the breath he’d been holding inside.

“I know,” he answers. “But this one thing… I don’t need you to do that for me.”

Steve apparently doesn’t have an answer for that. He goes silent, and after all his admissions, the compassionate parts of Bucky that can’t ever be stomped out feel like he owes Steve the grace of an excuse to not speak any further.

He knows he doesn’t. Bucky stands up anyway.

The chair beneath him scuffles against the floor, and it’s the only response to the last words spoken in the room. He heads to the kitchen. Steve follows him with his eyes, his brows knitting together.

“What are you doing?”

Bucky looks back at Steve over his shoulder and draws the corners of his lips up. It’s tight—he can feel as much—but at least it’s a smile.

“Making breakfast,” he responds with a shrug, as though the answer should have been obvious.

It’s not that everything is okay; it isn’t. The man he’s slowly falling for isn’t the person he knows as Steve Grant, but instead is Steve Rogers—Captain America—and that kind of shock doesn’t melt away under the gaze of cerulean blue eyes. But Bucky keeps his eyes on Steve’s for as long as it takes for Steve to stare back at him with something other than the darkness of memory on his face, and then he turns, opening the refrigerator and fetching the carton on the top shelf.

“How many fried eggs does it take to feed a super soldier?” he asks, turning Steve’s direction. “Will a half dozen do it?”

Steve’s mouth isn’t quite agape, but it’s close. Bucky suddenly feels a lot like he imagines Becca had felt when he’d told her—the only person he’d told—that he likes men and not women. He tries to focus on that feeling; he tries to channel it. He tries to imagine he’s the only person that can keep a secret so important that more than one lifetime of happiness depends upon it staying hidden.

“Yeah,” Steve nods, closing his mouth but not taking his eyes off Bucky’s. “Thank you.”

Bucky nods in return. He reaches down and opens the old, wooden cabinet, fishing around inside. He can’t find the pan he’s looking for at first, but finds a different one that’s just as good, even if Bucky has to keep in mind while he’s cooking that this pan burns hotter than the other.

At the end of the day, Steve Rogers has saved his life just as much as Steve Grant ever has. Bucky knows that doesn’t mean he owes him forgiveness.

He turns the stove on anyway.

—

That evening’s episode of _Antiques Roadshow_ is far less interesting than Bucky might normally find it on any other Tuesday night. He’s curled himself halfway into a ball on his regular spot in the armchair, facing away from Steve in his own standard haunt, sitting up straight on the middle cushion of the couch, shoulders stiff and square like a—

Well. Like a soldier.

“I think I want to sleep in my room tonight,” Bucky says, turning enough to speak at Steve from across the room. “If that’s okay.”

It’s been a long and strange day, to say the least. They’d eaten a simple, quiet breakfast of toast and eggs before reality won out, and then they had finally headed back to the field and done their duty to the land by taking their soil sample, bereft of anything else to do in the wake of their conversation. There was still a farm to run.

The rest of the afternoon had been silent, perhaps heavy, but not quite awkward. It's difficult to figure out what to do after the conversations they’ve had. Bucky doesn’t know if he’s supposed to crawl into Steve’s arms and kiss him and tell him that he’s been forgiven, or if he should glare across the room with a look that says, _‘I won’t forget your lies.’_ He doesn’t even know which of those is actually true.

What he does know is that he needs more time to sort through that on his own—whatever that may mean for them.

“Bucky,” Steve says, leaning forward from his stiff position. “Of course that’s okay. Of _course._ You…” Steve pauses, turning so he can lean in Bucky’s direction. “You know you don’t ever have to sleep with me, right? Or do anything with me ever again?”

Bucky’s stomach feels funny as he listens; he’s not sure if he’s supposed to answer that or not. He knows that Steve doesn’t… expect anything of him, but it feels weird and different to have an open conversation about it. He doesn’t know what he’s allowed to still want.

“We can go back to the way things were before.” Steve shifts uncomfortably in his seat, clasping his hands together in his lap. “You can leave, if that’s what you want. I would give you another year’s salary at least. Just to know you’d be comfortable.”

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky laughs, looking away to avoid the awkward eye contact. “You really need to be a bit more stingy with all your cash. Look, I’m not…” He pauses and nibbles on his lower lip, forcing himself to look at Steve’s face again so he knows Bucky is being serious. “I’m not leaving. I know this shit is crazy, but I don’t want to go. Besides, I’m not saying we can’t keep, like… _being_ something together,” and even Bucky doesn’t know what he means as he says it. “I just need to think for a minute. And I can’t do that when I’m laying in the same bed as you.”

Something between relief and understanding passes over Steve’s features. He nods, staring at Bucky until Bucky feels like he has to look away or be crushed under the weight of caring in that gaze.

He’s said what he needs to say for tonight. Bucky doesn’t have to make any decisions right now—Steve just said so.

The final antique appraised on the show that night is a wooden mantle clock that the hosts date back to a clockmaker from Brooklyn, New York, in the early twentieth century. Bucky can’t help but laugh.

* * *

_Bucky is twenty-four when he rolls over, away from the side that doesn’t feel broken, and spits out blood onto the floor._

“Please… please…”

_“George! George, no,_ please—”

_“No damn son of mine is gonna be a fuckin’ fairy, Winnifred!”_

“I… Don’t… Please!”

_Bucky is twenty-four when he feels his ribs shift inside his body._

_“Pops, please, don’t, I—_ ah!”

 _“What—you worried about your fuckin’ ribs? Way I see it, you’re not gonna be using ‘em anymore. The Lord made Eve from Adam’s rib, and since you ain’t gonna be takin’ no_ wife, _I don’t see the fuckin’ point in you even having—”_

“Please… please…”

“Buck, wake up.”

 _“Please_ , no—”

“Bucky!”

“No, no!”

“Sweetheart, please! You need to wake up!”

Bucky’s eyes snap open. He’s not on the floor anymore. He’s on a bed, and it’s soft, and—and this is his room, his room in _Steve’s_ house, and Steve is—

“Bucky,” Steve’s voice says, and then Bucky’s eyes adjust to the moonlit darkness. “Sweetheart, are you awake?”

“Steve…”

He’s kneeling next to the edge of the bed, face painted with alarm and concern and an overlying layer of set-jaw determination.

“Can I touch you?” Steve asks.

Bucky doesn’t respond with words. Chest still heaving, he scrambles closer to the edge of the mattress, to _Steve_ , but Steve meets him halfway and quickly folds him into his arms.

“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve whispers, pulling Bucky in tight until his face is planted just above his chest. “It’s okay. It was just a dream.”

“He—I…” Bucky hiccups. He can feel the tears stinging his face. “He was…”

But Bucky doesn’t want to finish that sentence. The images and the pain are so fresh in his mind still, and his side hurts, and all he wants to think about is the feeling of Steve rocking him back and forth.

“It’s okay,” Steve repeats, words pressed into the top of Bucky’s hair. “Sweetheart… You’re safe. No one is going to hurt you here.”

Steve holds him a while longer, and it’s quiet. Their resident barn owl is in the tree outside Bucky’s window tonight, hooting and cooing and telling him all the same things that Steve has promised him. He’s safe here.

Bucky’s tears dry eventually. It’s surprisingly easy to start falling back asleep when he’s wrapped up in Steve’s arms, and his eyelids begin to feel heavy. He starts losing time the way that the mind always does in the very beginnings of sleep, and then he can feel Steve moving, laying Bucky back down and pulling the sheets up to cover his chest.

“Wait,” Bucky says, voice raspy with sleep and dried tears. He reaches a hand out to Steve’s upper arm, holding it. “Will you stay?”

Steve pauses. He doesn’t stand and walk away, but he also doesn’t crawl under the sheets with Bucky.

“Are you sure?” Steve asks.

“Yes,” and Bucky is shocked at how firm he makes himself sound. “Please. I don’t want to be alone.”

He watches and listens as Steve stares down at him and lets out a long, heavy breath. Then Steve is moving, pulling back the sheets and the blankets and sliding his body in next to Bucky’s. He turns Bucky around in his arms and presses up against his back, warm and big and safe.

Steve has always had what feels to Bucky like an inborn sensuality and an aura of sex. None of that is in the room tonight.

“I could never leave you alone, Buck.”

The owl outside grows quiet. Bucky’s eyelids grow heavy, but they’re not ready to close. His brain is still running, even when the rest of him has lost all steam to keep living through this day.

Steve lied to him. Steve asked him to live in a home with him and withheld something as basic as the reality of who he is. But Bucky is lying in his own bed, and Steve’s arms are around him, and he can hear that Steve is still awake from his pattern of breathing. He’s waiting for Bucky to fall asleep first.

And that’s when Bucky realizes something. He knows inside—with absolute certainty—that he doesn’t have to forgive Steve. Bucky is worth enough to demand better from the people he fills his life with. It’s his decision if he wants to keep living with Steve, or keep cuddling with Steve, or keep kissing Steve and letting Steve touch him. He’s worth enough to be able to set standards for what’s okay and what’s not.

Bucky could be homeless, or he could be making a hundred grand a year coming up with big, complicated farming schemes. Bucky is worth the right to make his own decisions about his life either way—and he owes it to no one to explain the reasons for what he decides is right for himself.

He knows these things to be true. He knows he’s worth enough to have those things.

He knows because Steve Rogers taught him so.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Past Abuse - Details (Spoilers):** Bucky has a dream flashback to the day his father found out he was gay, and George Barnes reacted with violent abuse. This brief scene consists mostly of dialogue, but does heavily imply that Bucky is having his ribs broken by kicking. It also includes homophobic language. **To Skip:** Following the scene referencing Antiques Roadshow, skip down starting at the * * * past the italics until you see Steve saying, “Sweetheart, please! You need to wake up!”


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

**  
s t e v e**

o c t o b e r 2 5, 2 0 2 5

| 233 days until harvest |

“When is the repairman coming again?”

Steve looks up from his task of restacking the unused pallets of seed and fertilizer, not bothering to wait until Bucky’s no longer around to lift the two-hundred-pound bags. Bucky is sitting with a pencil in-hand, large expanses of graphing paper spread out on the workbench before him. He looks as enticing as he ever has, chewing on the end of an eraser that’s just as pink as his lips.

“Wednesday,” Steve answers. “Apparently Kelly had a bigger break in three sections just before we had our one. He’s gotta take care of her first.”

Bucky laughs at Steve, rolling his eyes.

“You _do_ know that there are other irrigation repair contractors out there, right?”

Steve draws his eyebrows together and gives Bucky a blank look.

“Why would I use someone else? I’ve been using Asher and his guys since I bought the unit.”

Bucky gives him a disbelieving stare for a long couple of seconds.

“You are…” he sighs, then shakes his head. “Okay. Good a reason as any, I guess. Looks like we’re waiting until Wednesday.”

Steve sets down the two pallets on his shoulders and turns, confused.

“Why is that so bad?” he questions. “It’s only four days.”

“Yeah, but the broken unit is on quad one in Block A, and that’s due for water on Monday, so…” He trails off, making a gesture with his hands like the rest of his reasoning should be obvious. “Unless you want to rearrange the irrigation schedule for the entire block, you’re going to have to move a unit over three or four to make it work.”

Steve hangs his head and curses silently. He’s grateful to have Bucky here—still here—keeping track of the finer minutia of the farming logistics for him, but he’s also secretly frustrated that Bucky is absolutely right. More work for Steve.

“Shit,” he murmurs, mostly to himself. “That’s going to be a pain in the ass. I’ll have to do it tomorrow morning.”

Bucky smirks and raises his hands in mock surrender.

“Sorry,” he chuckles. “Just don’t shoot the messenger.”

A chilly autumn wind suddenly rolls into the barn, bringing picturesque golden and orange leaves with it. Steve looks out the open doors towards the other end of the field and the broken irrigation unit in question, trying to decide how best to go about his upcoming task.

“Why do you say quads three and four?” Steve asks, walking towards the field and hearing Bucky’s footsteps trail behind him. “Don’t you mean one and four?”

They stop just inside the large, sliding barn doors to keep themselves shielded from the wind. Steve sees Bucky pull his Carhartt jacket tighter around him out of the corner of his eye.

“Mm, no,” Bucky answers. He points towards the troublesome irrigation block in question. “I mean, I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure the unit on quad one wouldn’t pivot enough. You’d have to relocate half the system to make that work. The unit on four could be rolled forward, but it might be easier to pivot the unit on three about forty-five degrees towards quad one.”

Steve scans the area in question and realizes that—once again—Bucky is absolutely right.

“Jesus,” he laughs. “What would I do without you?”

Steve glances to the side and finds Bucky already looking at him. There’s an affectionate smile gracing his already beautiful face.

“I don’t know. Probably count your acres of thirsty wheat.”

Steve laughs again and looks down, kicking around the acorns beneath his boot and stuffing his hands into his insulated pockets.

“Never heard a truer thing in my life.”

The air around them falls comfortably quiet; contemplative. Steve spends the time eyeing the sprouting fields, still in awe that anything growing in a piece of earth _he_ owns can look remotely close to healthy.

He’s in the middle of that thought when one of his hands is pulled from his pocket, and he looks down to find that Bucky has come to stand next to him. He’s staring up at Steve demurely, wide eyes and a hopeful expression that Steve knows is almost innocently manipulative. He’s trying to fit himself under Steve’s arm.

“Hi,” Bucky chirps.

Steve would be helpless to tamp down the fondness in the grin spreading over his face.

“C’mere,” he mutters, feigning a put-out sigh as he pulls Bucky close and wraps his arm around his waist. “Cold?”

Bucky goes easily and eagerly, snuggling his face against the thick, coarse fabric covering Steve’s chest.

“Mm,” Bucky shrugs. “Maybe a little. Or maybe I just wanted to cuddle.”

Something huge and warm and overwhelming swells in Steve’s core. He has to close his eyes and take a big, calming breath to suppress the urge to sweep Bucky off the ground and whisper in his ear that he loves him, that he would burn his entire field down to embers if that’s what Bucky wanted.

But he knows Bucky wants the green, even if he doesn’t know if Bucky wants him.

Having Bucky tucked into him like this isn’t the closest they've been in these past five days since Bucky found the remains of Steve’s shield, but it feels significant nonetheless. Steve has slept—and only slept—with him in Bucky’s bed every night since that first night, doing so at Bucky’s request, spooning up against him and holding him while they both sleep clothed in loose pairs of pants. Steve doesn’t know if Bucky asks for Steve to spend nights with him because he’s afraid of having more nightmares, but he thinks it might just be that he wants the intimacy; the feeling of being close with another person and taking comfort in their touch.

Sometimes, in the evening, Bucky will lay his head in Steve’s lap on the couch and nuzzle his lower thigh until Steve finally takes the hint and proceeds to play with his long, soft hair. Every last second of it feels to Steve like finding buried treasure. But they haven’t resumed a sexual relationship; they haven’t even kissed. Steve doesn’t know if Bucky wants that. He’s ready to accept it if Bucky never does, but he’s not going to make any assumptions for now, and he’s certainly not going to make any moves. Bucky will come to him if he decides he wants that for himself.

“I want to make chicken chili tonight,” Bucky announces into Steve’s jacket, words muffled. “With cornbread.”

Steve smiles. He softly brushes the knuckles of his free hand over Bucky’s cheek.

“Good. I want to eat chicken chili tonight.”

Bucky pulls his face from its cozy hiding spot, resting his dimpled chin over the jacket logo and looking up at Steve.

“With cornbread?” he asks, all cheeky humor and perfection and more than both Steve Rogers and Steve Grant have ever deserved.

Steve’s happy grin grows. He picks a wind-blown leaf from Bucky’s hair.

“Yes, Buck. With cornbread.”

—

Dinner is every bit as delicious as it had sounded described on Bucky’s tongue. Steve tries to mix the cornbread batter himself, but he does absolutely nothing else after that except for leaving the kitchen when he’s kicked out for taking up too much space. He sits at the table instead, watching Bucky cook. He _does_ think to be helpful enough to grab a new beer for Bucky once he’s finished his first.

(His gut warms at the wink Bucky gives him when Steve hands it over.)

They share space on the couch that evening, watching whatever old western they come across on the television. Steve tries not to look too happy when Bucky cuddles into him the same way he had that afternoon in the barn—but he doesn’t deny himself the smile.

John Wayne is confronting what feels like the eighth set of bandits that have sprung up so far when Bucky starts shifting like he’s going to get up. Steve adjusts his arm so Bucky can move, and he’s somewhat stunned when Bucky doesn’t leave the couch, but instead crawls into Steve’s lap and straddles his thighs, wrapping arms around Steve’s neck.

“Bucky,” Steve cautions softly. “We don’t have to—”

“Were you always Steve Rogers with me?”

The question strikes Steve right in the chest. It’s not that he has to think about his answer; he knows the word ‘yes’ by heart. He’s just not sure if it’s the answer Bucky wants to hear.

“Yes,” he answers anyway, because Steve can’t be anything other than honest with Bucky after what he’s done.

Bucky chews on his lower lip thoughtfully. He’s mulling something over—perhaps what he wants to say next.

“So… Steve Rogers. Is that… Is that my Steve?”

 _‘My_ Steve.’ Steve’s heart and lungs melt together between his ribs and become one beating, breathing mass of affection.

“Always,” he promises. “Always been your Steve.”

Bucky’s eyes travel across Steve’s features, and then he straightens his back, setting his jaw determinedly. He gives Steve a single, firm nod.

“Then that's what I want. Who I want.” Bucky tentatively trails his fingers over the mass of muscle in Steve’s shoulder. “I want to be with my Steve. With Steve Rogers.”

It’s the heaviest thing Bucky has ever said to him, and Steve hears the words not just in his ears, but in his bones. He sinks at least six inches into the couch.

Steve permits his hands to come around and circle Bucky’s waist.

“Sweetheart…” he says. “Are you sure?”

Bucky’s only answer is a kiss, and it’s been five days since Steve has been allowed to have Bucky’s lips. If this is what Bucky wants, then Steve isn’t going to hesitate to give it to him.

He goes with it when Bucky deepens the embrace, closing his eyes and letting that side of himself with hard but loving edges take over, stoking the heat of the power behind their lips. Their tongues are only just beginning to slide over each other’s, enjoying the slick caresses and hot feelings, when Bucky suddenly pulls back. He is beautiful and breathless.

“Wait, Steve, I...”

Steve tears himself from Bucky’s face as though his lips have burned him. He immediately loosens his grip on his hips, backing off as much as he can in his seat and hardly touching him at all in case Bucky wants to bolt from his lap.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, level, but alarmed nonetheless. “We don’t have to do this, we can stop—”

“Steve,” Bucky laughs. “No, I—I just had something I wanted to talk to you about.” He looks down for a minute with an expression akin to bashful. “Something I was thinking about before… all of that stuff.”

The knot in Steve’s gut eases. He allows himself to return his hands to Bucky’s hips, this time stroking up and down his sides with soft, encouraging touches. He waits until Bucky is ready to speak.

“So I… I still want to have sex with you.”

It’s not the sentence Steve was expecting—if he’d been expecting anything at all—but the smile returns to his face. He can’t help it if he’s happy; relieved. He also can’t help the sudden glow that starts in his heart and radiates to his fingers and toes.

“I’m so glad, sweetheart,” Steve says, continuing to pet him over his shirt. “But… you know you don’t have to.” He leans forward to kiss Bucky’s cheek, then his lips, chaste. “We can just do this.”

“I know,” Bucky shrugs. “But it’s what I want.”

Steve chuckles and rubs his nose against Bucky’s. Deep down, he knows it’s entirely possible Bucky might just be interested in having sex with him because he’s ready to lose his virginity, and as much as the thought hurts, Steve finds that he’s more overwhelmed by his intense gratitude that Bucky would trust him with that.

“You can change your mind—now, later. Anytime.” He presses a tender, dry kiss to Bucky’s mouth, whispering the rest. “But I’d feel so lucky if you chose me to do that with.”

Bucky grins gleefully and dives in for another kiss. Steve responds with something light, but then he pulls away, sliding a finger under Bucky’s chin.

“Not tonight, though—right?” he asks—reminds—making sure Bucky keeps his eye contact. “We still gotta teach your body how to take me.”

Bucky nods, blushing furiously and squirming the tiniest bit in Steve’s lap like he just can’t help it, and Steve knows he remembers. For as much as they both want Steve to get inside him as soon as possible, they both know that Bucky’s not ready to take anymore more than a few fingers until they work on getting him to open up.

“Daddy…”

Steve answers by taking his mouth in a demanding kiss. It lasts less than a minute before Bucky pulls back again, gasping. Steve doesn’t jump or panic at the pause this time around.

“Wait, I…” Bucky stops whatever he was going to say to lick his lips, and it takes everything Steve has not to lean forward and lick them, too. “I wanted to tell you something else.”

Steve gazes back attentively, letting Bucky take all the time he needs.

“Go ahead, sweetheart,” he says. “Anything. I’ll always listen.”

Bucky takes a deep, steadying breath.

“I… I don’t want you to wear a condom when we have sex.”

Steve’s hands freeze where they’re rubbing comforting circles into the skin beneath Bucky’s shirt.

“Bucky…”

“Wait! Just—just think about it,” Bucky interjects, grabbing Steve’s shoulders and adjusting in his lap like he’s settling in to make his case. He knows that’s exactly what he’s doing. “I’ve never been with anyone before, and it’s not like either of us are going to be fucking anyone else, and—Jesus, you can’t even catch anything, right? The serum?”

Bucky melts into a hopeful, irresistible puddle, his expression now purposeful and seductive. It reminds Steve very much of their first night in each other’s arms and the first move Bucky ever made on him.

“Think about it,” Bucky husks into their shared space. “Think about how it would feel to go bare inside me. Nothing between us, no barriers. Just you and me.” He smiles mischievously and leans in to breathe right into Steve’s ear. Steve balls up his fists at his side and tries to keep a hold of himself, for Bucky’s sake. “Think about what it would be like to fill me up—"

“Bucky,” Steve interrupts. There’s an undertone of warning seeping in, and it’s as much for himself as it is for Bucky. “Listen to me. It’s a dangerous world out there—I know you know that—and some of the things you could catch are life-threatening. You need to always use protection.” He pauses, debating if he even wants to say the next part, but then he decides that’s the whole point of his argument. “Even if some of your future partners may try to… dissuade you.”

Bucky jerks back.

“Future partners?” he echoes back, voice gone hurt and hollow. “What—you’re already thinking of me running away and fucking other guys?”

The truth, of course, is that Steve is always thinking about that in the back of his mind. Half of it is the possessive monster in him that wants to keep Bucky to himself for the rest of both their natural lives. The other half is much more realistic.

“Baby…” he sighs.

“I only want _you,_ Steve,” Bucky says. He gently rubs the tips of his fingers through Steve’s beard, brushing the vulnerable skin on his jaw beneath it. “Why can’t you understand that?”

Steve is caught between desires, only one of which is so selfish as to say ‘yes’ simply because he _does_ want to know what it feels like to come inside Bucky, bare, nothing between the warmth of their joined flesh. But, as much as he wants to, Steve can’t keep Bucky forever, and he harbors an intense drive to know that Bucky will stay safe and know how to protect himself even in the life he’ll live after Steve. Steve knows he’s in love. He also knows his love is not conditional upon Bucky staying here, or ever loving him back.

The third thing he knows is that he’s weak against anything those steel-gray eyes could ever ask of him, two sirens calling for Steve to give in and give himself over.

“Okay,” he concedes, gripping Bucky’s hips when he feels him jolt with excitement in his lap. “Okay—but first, you have to promise me. You have to promise me that later in your life—”

_“—Steve—”_

“Promise me.”

It’s a demand now; Steve needs to hear this. He needs to know for his own peace of mind that he did what he could to keep Bucky safe even after Bucky inevitably moves on from him.

He softens his eyes and cups Bucky’s face in his palms.

“I… We can do this, sweetheart,” he assures gently. “Just you and me, and you’re right, I can’t give you anything, can’t get anything. But I need you to promise me—right now—that with your future partners, you’ll _always_ use protection.”

Bucky chews on his lower lip and gives Steve a half-glare of a look.

“I don’t like that you’re thinking like this.”

 _“Promise_ me,” Steve repeats, and has to swallow a lump in his throat before he can work up his next words. They’re too hopeful. “Think about it, sweetheart. If it really is only ever going to be me…”

Steve watches Bucky’s chest rise and fall for the expanse of a few slowing breaths. He waits for him to finish Steve’s words.

“I… Yeah,” Bucky sighs. “If you’re the only one, then what have I got to lose.”

Steve nods and gives him an encouraging smile. He pulls Bucky’s face in for a kiss, letting it last for a long, sweet moment, and Bucky’s expression has fallen soft by the time they part lips. There’s also a sadness there that Steve immediately vows to himself to chase away.

He just needs to hear this first.

“Okay,” Bucky whispers. “Daddy. Steve. I promise.”

Steve exhales.

“Thank you, honey.”

He wastes no time rewarding Bucky for being good. Steve wraps one arm fully around his waist and pulls Bucky in tight, using his other hand to hold the side of his face. Steve’s palm and fingers dwarf his head; they engulf half of it.

Bucky makes a mewling sound as Steve brings him in for a kiss. Steve responds by deepening it, rumbling out a growl of a sound against his lips and threading fingers through Bucky’s hair.

“So sweet for Daddy,” he husks, leaving Bucky’s mouth to kiss across his barely stubbled jawline. “Aren’t you, Buck? Tell Daddy how sweet you are.”

Bucky whimpers in his lap and tilts his head back, welcoming Steve’s lips and tongue and teeth when they begin traveling down the offered expanse of his neck. He grips onto Steve’s hair with both hands to ground himself as Steve nips and sucks little bruises into his skin. The old marks have faded in the days since Steve left them.

“I—I’m sweet,” Bucky answers, a trembling, obedient whisper.

It shocks Steve how much the words make him lose it. He’s standing before he can think twice and lifting Bucky with him, swallowing the shocked yelp that falls from Bucky’s lips.

Steve turns, lowering Bucky to the couch before beginning his work to swiftly remove Bucky’s clothes: shirt first, then pants, before finally moving on to his underwear. Bucky seems too caught up in the sensation of Steve’s mouth tonguing and kissing every new bit of him that comes into the low evening light, and Steve is glad of it. He wants Bucky to discard every shred of insecurity or anything but pleasure when he’s underneath him.

He doesn’t stop to ask Bucky if he wants this while he strips him; he knows Bucky knows by now that he can tell Steve to stop at any point, and they both know that Steve will. Steve trusts Bucky to hit the brakes if Steve does anything he doesn’t want.

“Fuck, I— _Daddy_ …”

“Mm,” Steve rumbles. “That’s right, baby boy. Daddy wants to make you feel good.” He mouths wetly over the inside of Bucky’s knee. “Wanna make you feel as sweet as you taste.”

Steve grabs the remote control and turns off the television so he doesn’t have to hear John Wayne’s voice while he’s busy pleasing his boy. He discards the little pair of boxer briefs to an unimportant arm of some furniture before plunging upwards from his knees to steal a hot, deep kiss of promise. It elicits a gorgeous whimpering sound.

Lithe fingers travel down to the buttons of Steve’s shirt while he dominates Bucky’s lips, loosening and popping them open, trying to get Steve’s chest bare until the reach of Bucky’s shorter arms isn’t enough.

“You gonna be good while Daddy gets you in his mouth?”

A wicked grin takes over Steve’s face when Bucky nods frantically, begging with both his body and breathy voice.

“Yes, Daddy— _oh…”_ He throws his head back as Steve leans up again and nips along his jaw. “Please?”

Steve sinks back down to his knees between Bucky’s legs, shirt halfway open and exposing his chest hair and scarring. He grabs Bucky’s thighs and hoists them over his shoulders smoothly, and he tugs Bucky’s easy weight forward with hands on his waist until his ass is on the edge of the cushion.

He doesn’t draw it out; Steve dips down and takes Bucky’s hard, weeping dick into his mouth in one go, letting the head hit the back of his throat.

“Oh! _Fuck.”_

Steve grins around the cock between his lips. He wraps his hands around Bucky’s upper thighs from the outside until his fingertips reach the smooth-feeling joining inside his hips, arms encircling Bucky’s thighs completely. Steve tugs Bucky up into his mouth before pulling him away again, moving and thrusting _for_ Bucky, using his strength to fuck his dick in and out of Steve’s throat.

“Oh my god,” Bucky whines, tossing his head back against the backrest. “Oh my god, _oh my god…”_

“Mm,” Steve hums, taking Bucky out of his mouth with a lewd noise and mouthing along the underside of his shaft. “Does Daddy’s throat feel good, sweetheart? Tell me.”

“Yes!” comes the gasped answer. “Please… _please_ don’t stop, please, I—”

Steve takes over holding Bucky’s minuscule weight by wrapping one arm around his waist. He interrupts those beautiful pleading sounds by pressing a thumb between his lips, demanding entry, and when Bucky opens his mouth, Steve knows it’s from shock as much as it is a drive to please Steve and follow any direction he gives.

“Get it wet, honey,” Steve murmurs against the leaking head of his dick. “Nice and wet for Daddy.”

Bucky closes his eyes and eagerly does as he’s been asked; of course he does. He’s perfection, handed to Steve in a neat little package half his own size.

Steve pulls his thumb free once Bucky has gotten it nice and sloppy with his spit. He presses it against the skin below Bucky’s balls at the same time as he takes Bucky’s cock back into his throat.

Bucky _screams._

Steve would chuckle if not for the obstruction happily snug in his airway. He begins to rub his thumb up and down over Bucky’s sensitive perineum, introducing him to the delights of a well-executed prostate massage.

“Daddy!” Bucky keens, thrashing in Steve’s arms and trying to shove down into the pressure. “Daddy, it’s—it feels so good, what— _Daddy!”_

Steve pulls off just long enough to answer Bucky’s question.

“That’s your prostate, honey. A sweet spot for a sweet boy. Daddy can play with it from the outside just like he does on the inside.”

Steve goes back to sucking his cock and focuses on finding the perfect amount of pressure, something that makes Bucky squirm without wanting to squirm away. Steve finds it quickly, and then he’s alternating between taking him deep into his throat and sucking on the head while his thumb relentlessly rolls over the sensitive gland under his slicked-up skin, up and down, rubbing him lovingly.

He knows Bucky won’t last long once he starts allowing his thumb to trail downward to massage Bucky’s tight hole instead, and he’s right. He doesn’t even make it to pressing inside before Bucky is trying to thrust further into Steve’s throat and whining when he finds no leverage. Steve takes mercy on him.

Steve Rogers is nothing if not a devoted swallower. His baby tastes just as sweet as he sounds.

—

Once they make it to the shower, Steve lifts Bucky up like he’s always wanted to, pressing his back against the wall and encouraging his legs to wrap around Steve’s waist. Bucky ends up coming again, this time with two of Steve’s fingers thrusting inside him and a voice in his ear telling him all the ways Daddy is going to fill him up.

Afterwards, Steve ruts into the crease of Bucky’s leg and hip, Bucky’s clumsy hands pawing around, until he finishes himself. It’s been five days; Bucky gets soaked with more than just the just warm spray of water.

They fall asleep early that night. Steve’s bed is soft and perfect, filled to the edges with shared body heat.

It’s not that Steve has forgiven himself; he’s not sure he ever completely will.

But he feels lighter.

Steve has never been told by someone who both wasn’t on the battlefield in Wakanda and wasn’t anywhere at all afterwards that what happened on that day wasn’t because Steve failed. Maybe it’s Bucky's unassailable innocence, or maybe it’s the five years Bucky spent away from atoms and life, but Steve finds those words land differently coming from him than they had from Nat, or from Tony. Even from Sam.

Steve hasn’t forgiven himself. No.

But—for once—he feels like he has the right to see his wheat spring up green.

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Visual aid!** If you’d like to check out Steve and Bucky’s new, ahem, _toy box_ as featured in this chapter, visit [this post](https://the1918.tumblr.com/post/643516800217350144/farmer-steve-and-buckys-new-toy-box-a-visual) on my tumblr.

* * *

**b u c k y**

o c t o b e r 2 8, 2 0 2 5

| 230 days until harvest |

Bucky has bruises all over his neck these days, and he likes them.

Bucky likes them a _lot_.

The hickies are as much his fault as they are Steve’s. Now that they’ve moved past that strange hiccup at the outset of their budding relationship—whatever kind of ‘relationship’ it may be—Bucky finds it hard to keep his hands off his… _Daddy_. His boyfriend?

Whatever.

It doesn’t matter where they are or what they’re doing; Bucky is always reaching out to trace fingers along the strong lines of Steve’s shoulders, or the curve and bulk of his arms. Steve gives as good as he gets in that regard—maybe even more.

Bucky earns himself the pretty blue glass plug one more time after spending a heated make-out session in the barn _begging_ Steve for it. Steve takes him inside, and he isn’t hurried as he slides it inside Bucky and makes him come all over the sheets. He pats Bucky’s ass afterward and sends him off to make the peach pie he’s admittedly been hyping up for days. Later, when Steve finally takes the plug out, he surprises Bucky by slipping him two fingers and even the very tip of a third, praising him endlessly for _“taking it so well, sweetheart.”_

(Steve is oddly insistent on learning how to make a pie while Bucky is busy in the kitchen that day. He hovers over Bucky the entire time, and each time Bucky looks up, Steve is already looking back at him. When Bucky playfully accuses him of _“staring at me like a creep,”_ Steve just grins and claims that he can’t help it, not when _“a sweet thing like you is baking my pie and wearing my plug._ ”) 

And now there’s this: a brown cardboard box on the kitchen table and Steve’s uncharacteristically eager puppy-dog gaze.

“Can I open it for you?” Steve asks.

‘For you.’ Because Steve keeps insisting this package is for Bucky, full of things that now belong to _Bucky_. These are things Steve picked out—things his Daddy picked out—special, just for Bucky.

Bucky nods dumbly and forgets to blush. Steve grins, and he proceeds to open the box with a pair of scissors.

“Oh,” is all Bucky can say when he finally sees the sort of things he already knew he would find.

Steve grins. He comes around to Bucky’s side of the table, sliding his arms around him from behind and resting his chin on Bucky’s shoulder.

“I know it looks like a lot,” he murmurs into Bucky’s ear. “Want to sit down, sweetheart? I can tell you all about how we’re going to use them.”

Bucky nods. He really does want that; needs that. He’s overwhelmed already.

“Please.”

At first, he thinks Steve is going to take him to the living room, maybe sit him on the couch, but then he spins Bucky around, grabs Bucky by the waist, and carries him further into the kitchen like he doesn’t have legs of his own. He sets Bucky down on the countertop.

“You’re a nuisance,” Bucky grumbles as Steve returns to the table to grab the box of… stuff. “And you’ve become obsessed with putting me on these counters. There _are_ chairs in this house.”

“Can’t help it,” Steve shrugs unapologetically. He sets the open box down next to Bucky, then inserts himself into the vee of his thighs. “You look so sweet up here. And this way, your Daddy can get nice and close.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, but he still laughs—even when the presence of the box sitting next to him suddenly feels tangible in the room.

“Did you see one you wanted to start with?” Steve asks, rubbing up and down his sides in a comforting gesture. His hands are so big wrapped around Bucky’s waist. “Or do you want me to pick?”

Bucky doesn’t even have the courage to look down at the box now that it’s so close. He cheats his face towards his other side, away, trying to remove it from his peripheral vision.

“I, um. I want you to pick.”

Steve nods his understanding. He leans in, giving Bucky a quick kiss on the lips. Even the little peck is phenomenal for helping to calm Bucky’s nerves.

Without looking, Bucky watches Steve reach into the box next to him and pull out a long, rectangular package. It’s purple with sexy-looking fonts all over it. It’s not until Steve is done opening it and uncovering what’s inside that Bucky can see it’s—well. It’s a dick? Kinda. A weird dick. A dick with ribs and notches, big round sections that Bucky thinks might be called _anal_ _beads_. He can’t hold in his gasp.

“Is this your first dildo, sweetheart?”

Bucky kind of hates Steve for asking the question. They both know Steve already knows the answer; he’s only asking to make Bucky blush.

“Yes, Daddy,” he mumbles anyway.

Steve grins at the response. He shakes the toy a bit so Bucky can see how the flexible silicone wiggles before placing it in Bucky’s hands.

He doesn’t know what he thought a dildo—beads, whatever—would feel like in his hand, but for some reason, this isn’t it. It’s lighter than Bucky expects, for one. The coloring is the same solid purple as the box, and it’s about two inches longer than Steve’s fingers, not including the base. The bead at the tip is skinny; narrower than the glass plug they’ve been using. The notches get bigger and bigger the higher up it goes, and the two closest to the base are thicker than anything he’s taken before. Bucky shivers.

“It’s a beaded dildo,” Steve explains, and Bucky can’t help but think it bizarre to hear such a big, gruff man say ‘dildo.’ “That bottom notch is about three of my fingers. If you can take that, then those fingers will be easy.”

Bucky just kind of… stares at it. His heart is beating fast, but he knows it’s out of excitement more than nerves. His dick gives an interested twitch inside his sweats when he imagines Steve putting the toy inside him, bead by bead, notch by notch, telling him how it’s going deeper than anything Bucky has had before.

“I, um…” Bucky mumbles. “I think I like it.”

Steve beams at him like he’s done some great thing instead of stumbling out an inexperienced opinion on a weird, purple dildo.

Fuck. He really does like it.

“I’m glad.”

Steve reaches into the box again. He starts opening a different package while Bucky examines the new dildo— _his_ new dildo—further. Bucky eventually decides to set it aside on the countertop and look at it more later, and that’s when he sees Steve holding what Bucky recognizes as a set of— _fuck_ —more butt plugs. They’re similar in shape to the glass plug, maybe more conical, and they’re black. They look like they’re made of silicone.

Bucky gulps.

“Those, um,” he worries. “Some of those look really big.”

Steve grins at him and sets the two bigger ones down on the counter, handing Bucky the smallest one. The base is oblong instead of circular. It’s not as girthy as the dildo, but it’s somewhat thicker than the one and only plug he’s taken before.

“This is called an anal training set,” Steve explains, gesturing to the three plugs of progressively larger size. “We can start with the smallest—or maybe even the middle one, with how good you’ve been—and work our way up.” He gives Bucky a crooked smirk. “And they’re designed for wearing.”

Bucky’s face is on fire now. He picks up the medium-sized plug, judging it to be maybe an inch and a half in diameter at the thickest point. He imagines fitting it inside himself and then going about the day’s farm work with Steve knowing that he’s wearing it. He’s just setting it down when he sees Steve pick up the largest plug.

“Once you can take this one, we can move on to your biggest toy,” he says, and Bucky’s face goes from cherry-red to completely drained of blood.

“There’s—” he squeaks. “You bought something _bigger_ than that?”

“I did.” Steve sets the plug aside, taking Bucky’s face in his hands. He kisses him sweet before breathing out against his mouth. “We have to get you ready to take me. Right?”

Bucky shocks himself with an uncontrolled, whoreish moan. He doesn’t mean to let it out; it’s just impossible to keep it inside when he’s got Steve’s beard brushing against his chin at the same time as he’s holding a butt plug that his Daddy bought him to wear around the house. He swallows.

“Right.”

Steve praises him with another kiss and fetches a new item from the box. When he takes it out of its package, Bucky sees that this toy is different from the others. It’s nothing he’s ever seen in porn. It looks like it’s made of hard plastic, and it’s skinny, somewhat long with a funny shape at the end.

“What’s that?” he asks.

Steve grins.

“This one…” He pauses with the sound of a ridiculously hot, dark sort of laughter. “Well, this one is just for fun.”

And then a button gets pushed, and the sounds of buzzing fill the kitchen.

_“Oh.”_

It’s… It’s a vibrator. Bucky has always thought of those as something people with clits use to get off. He didn’t realize he could use one, too.

“‘Oh,’” Steve echoes with another deadly chuckle.

He shuts off the button, and Bucky feels like he might be able to think again without the tease of that humming sound rumbling around in his ears. Steve hands the vibrator over to Bucky.

“Why is it shaped like that?” Bucky asks, taking the sleek contraption into his hands.

“It’s a prostate massager,” comes Steve’s answer, and yeah—Bucky’s face goes up in flames again.

“I… Um,” he says, because he loves the idea of that so fucking bad he could start shaking right here on the countertop.

He runs his fingertip along the crooked end of the toy, imagining it pressing up against that sweet spot inside him the same way Steve does when he’s fingering him. He’s wondering if it works from the outside, too, when Steve moves into his space and covers Bucky’s hand with his own so they’re holding the toy together.

The shared body heat, Steve’s huge frame against him, the sexy little implement in their joined hands… Bucky can’t hold in his whimper.

“Would you like Daddy to use that on you sometime, sweetheart?” Steve asks, and Bucky’s throat bobs under a dry swallow. Steve chuckles when he can do nothing but nod his response. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

Steve takes the massager from him and places it on the table.

“There’s two more toys in there,” he says, “as well as some new kinds of slick. Do you want to take the last two out yourself?”

Nervous, Bucky nuzzles into Steve and immediately gets a kiss, which he melts into. It helps him gather his wits so he can whisper, _“Yes, Daddy.”_

He decides to pull out the smaller of the two boxes first, and he doesn’t really look at the picture on the front before he opens it. It’s another dildo, flesh-colored and veiny. It’s not thick like Steve, but it might be just as long.

“That one will be good for you. You can start learning to take something deeper.” Steve pauses, grinning. “And—if you want—it’s big enough for Daddy to really fuck you with.”

Bucky might be drooling at the picture that paints in his head, even if he doesn’t know if he wants something that isn’t Steve’s cock really _fucking_ him; not that deep. All he can respond with is another dumb, “Oh,” because his own dick is definitely hard in his sweats. He wonders if Steve has noticed yet, or if that much bigger bulge in front of him means Steve is hard, too.

“Go ahead, baby. Show me the last one.”

‘The last one,’ as it turns out, is the biggest package in the box. Bucky’s hands shake as he begins opening it.

“Hey, hey,” Steve says softly, placing his hands over Bucky’s to still his fingers. “Check in with me. How are you feeling? Too much at once?”

Bucky stops to think about the question. He knows Steve likes it when he gives honest answers instead of the answers he assumes Steve wants to hear.

“It’s a lot,” he admits, trying to play off his nerves with a shrug. “But I think I’m just excited. I want to be able to use all of these so we…” He trails off, leaning forward until his face is buried in the meat of Steve’s pec, and the rest of his words come out muffled. “So you can fuck me.”

Bucky can feel the vibrations of Steve’s gentle laughter beneath his lips.

“I’m excited for that, too. More than you know. And I got these things so we can have fun together, but they’re also to get you ready for me.” Steve takes the big package from Bucky’s hands. “Do you want Daddy to open this one?”

Bucky nods against Steve’s shoulder, rolling his forehead up and down over the muscle before finally unburying his face. He watches Steve efficiently discard the packaging.

“Oh my _God.”_

It’s another dildo, this time made from clear silicone.

It’s also the size of Bucky’s forearm _._

“This one will come last,” Steve assures him, murmuring his words into the side of Bucky’s head as Bucky marvels at the monstrosity in Steve’s hand. “And I’ll help you. I won’t have you try it until I know you’re ready for it.”

“I…” he croaks, mouth opening and closing like a fish. “I really don’t think that’s going to fit in me.”

Steve chuckles, but isn’t mocking. The sound is rich and deep next to Bucky’s ear.

“Don’t worry, it will. And I’ll make sure it feels good, too.” He kisses Bucky on the cheek. “When you can feel sweet taking this one, that’s how I’ll know you’re ready to have me inside you.”

Steve hands the dildo to Bucky, and Bucky almost doesn’t take it. It’s terrifying, but still—he understands why Steve says that if Bucky can take this, then he can take Steve.

It might be _bigger_ than Steve, he realizes, and then words bubble up out of Bucky’s chest from seemingly nowhere.

“I don’t want it.”

He feels Steve tense up beside him for a brief couple of seconds, but then he relaxes. He uses his big hands to rub up and down the sides of Bucky’s arms.

“That’s okay, Buck. That’s perfectly fine. We can get something different. You can browse the whole website—”

“No,” Bucky interrupts. “That’s not what I—I just don’t want one that big.”

Before Steve can respond, Bucky sets the dildo down on the countertop beside him and leans forward, tugging Steve closer into him with arms around his neck. A collection of discarded cardboard and plastic packaging crunches between the tile and Steve’s shoes as he moves in.

“I don’t…” Bucky starts, trying to find his words as he tilts his head upwards. “I don’t want one as big as you.”

Bucky can feel his own body vibrating. He doesn’t know why; maybe it’s the rush of seeing all those toys Steve is going to work into him, or maybe it’s the thought of finally getting to take Steve, or maybe it’s the nerves about the fantasy Bucky knows he’s about to fess up to.

“Baby, why?” Steve asks, warm hands circling Bucky’s waist. “I don’t want you to be hurting when I’m in you.”

And Steve’s not wrong that it will hurt, at least at first. Bucky knows that. But it won’t be unbearable, and it won’t be as bad as it would if they didn’t use all these other sizes first, and he knows Steve will be gentle and will make the hurt go away as quickly as he can. There are things that are more important to Bucky for his first time than avoiding pain completely.

“I know it might be, um. A little uncomfortable,” he says, avoiding the word ‘pain’ so as not to set off Steve. “At first, at least. And I know the stretch is going to be a lot, but I… I want it to feel more special.”

He gets sort of an odd stare from Steve, like he’s trying to process Bucky’s meaning, but then Bucky sees the implication visibly click in his head and—and then Steve is groaning full and _deep_ , angling his head down to smother the sound in the side of Bucky’s neck before nipping the cleft of his chin. His hands get greedy, insatiable, pulling Bucky forward to make his legs spread more and push their clothed groins together.

“That so, sweetheart?” he growls out through gravel. “You want Daddy’s cock to be the first thing that stretches you open that wide?”

Bucky whimpers again, overwhelmed by the way things have escalated so swiftly. His erection had momentarily waned with nerves, but now it’s back in full force, and oh— _Jesus_ —Steve is definitely hard, too. Bucky can feel that great, big dick against his own.

He grasps at the back of Steve’s head and buries his fingers in the sandy blond hair there to ground himself.

“The _only_ thing, Daddy,” Bucky begs. “Please.”

And that’s when Steve starts absolutely _losing_ it, right there between his legs. He’s close all over, filling Bucky’s space with his lips and heat and skin and the scratch of his thick beard, mouthing and pawing like he’s trying his best to eat him alive. He bites down on Bucky’s collarbone, nowhere near gentle enough to avoid a mark, and he doesn’t let up on his iron grip on Bucky’s waist even when he finally pulls back and creates room between their bodies.

“ _Get it out_ , baby,” Steve grits through his teeth. “Get Daddy’s cock out.”

It’s only then that Bucky realizes he’s been making noises of his own; high, keening moans that he’s probably been letting out since Steve first got his mouth on Bucky’s neck. His sounds only get louder when he follows Steve’s order and uses his stumbling, overeager hands to pull down the waistband of Steve’s joggers, reaching into his boxer briefs to grab Steve’s cock with as much of a grip as the inadequate circumference of his fingers will allow.

 _Fuck_ … his Daddy is so damn big.

“Look,” Steve growls. “Look at that. Is that what you want inside you without practicing for it?” He lets go of one hip to thread fingers through Bucky’s hair, making sure his head keeps facing down. “You think you can sit on this dick without crying?”

And now it’s Bucky’s turn to lose it. He can’t get that glorious image of it out of his head: Steve on his back and Bucky straddling him, reaching back behind himself to hold that monster of a cock straight in the air as he aims it at his perfectly stretched hole. He could lower himself, sink down onto Daddy and take Daddy in him, and yes, _yes_ , the burn would be so damn good, and Steve would tell him to slow down, but Bucky wouldn’t need to because he would be such a good boy for Steve, and he could take all of Daddy’s cock in one go, no matter how wide it stretched him.

 _“Wanna_ cry,” Bucky whines, nodding furiously with his forehead pressed to Steve’s. “Wan’ you to make me cry on it ‘cause it feels so good.”

Steve groans and captures Bucky’s mouth with his own. He wastes no time before putting his tongue into play, owning Bucky’s lips and tongue from the inside out.

“Fuck. _Fuck,_ baby boy,” Steve swears against his lips. He pulls away, and Bucky makes a pathetic, sad noise when Steve tucks his thick dick beneath his waistband. “Legs up. You’re coming with me.”

He lifts Bucky off the counter effortlessly when Bucky wraps his legs around him, and yeah… that super strength is never going to not be hot.

Steve starts to head to the staircase, but then he backs up to their previous spot on the counter and tells Bucky to grab a few things from the box with a _“That plug right there—oh, yeah, you want that one?—fuck, and get your little purple toy,”_ before finally hauling him to Steve’s sprawling bed upstairs. Bucky is amazed that he gets them there at all with how fervent Steve’s determination is to suck at least ten different bruises into his wreck of a neck.

They get their clothes off quickly. Steve disappears into the bathroom with the new toys for a minute, and Bucky hears the sink running. He returns with a big towel and the newly washed dildo and plug, spreading all three things and Bucky himself out on the bed.

Bucky thinks he’s gotten _really_ good at taking the first finger quickly. The second finger is still always a stretch, but he loosens up much more easily than he did the first couple of times.

“You think you’re about ready for three?” Steve husks from between Bucky’s legs.

Bucky nods fervently. He’s on his back on the towel, a pillow under his hips to tilt them up. Steve is naked on his stomach with Bucky’s knees propped over his shoulders, beard and lips wet from eating Bucky out. It’s so fucking erotic, and _damn,_ Bucky has a gorgeous view of the curve of Steve’s hairy ass.

“Yes—a _-oh!”_ He chokes on his own breath when Steve’s fingers curl up into his spot again. “I’m ready, Daddy. Want it.”

To Bucky’s confusion, Steve pulls his fingers all the way out instead of pushing in a third. At first he thinks that he’s just getting more lube, because he watches Steve pick up the bottle, but then he also picks up the new beaded dildo with all its purple silicone notches.

“Don’t worry,” Steve says, seeing Bucky’s wide eyes. “We’ll go slow. I promise it will feel good.”

And now Bucky remembers Steve saying that the biggest bead is about the size of three of his fingers, so he guesses it doesn’t really matter which they do first. There’s a pause and a question on Steve’s face.

“Okay,” Bucky nods. “Yeah.”

Steve grins. He wipes his lube-wet hand on the towel before laying back down on his stomach between Bucky’s spread legs, kissing the sensitive skin of Bucky’s inner thigh.

The first notch slides in as easily as one fingertip—no resistance now that Bucky has taken two—but Steve goes slow anyways. He _really_ takes his time pressing over the second, thicker bead, which feels dumb, because it isn’t even as wide as two fingers. Bucky is just about to call Steve out on teasing when the rib of that second notch pops past his rim, and then Steve doesn’t even let Bucky’s moan follow through to its end before he’s reversing direction and pulling it back _out_ so the same notch pops through again and fuck fuck _fuck—_ the _sensation_.

“Oh, God… _Daddy…”_

“Mm. ‘S a sensitive little thing right here,” Steve murmurs, like he’s talking directly to Bucky’s hole. He traces the tip of his index finger around the stretched rim. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

Bucky doesn’t have the words to respond. Steve pushes the notch in and out two more times, and then he changes the angle so the rounded tip of the toy points up and—

_“Fuck!”_

Steve makes a humming noise that sounds almost more like a growl.

“Sweet spot for a sweet boy…”

He continues that incredible, slow torture for a minute or two longer, rolling the tip up into Bucky’s prostate every few strokes inward. Soon, Bucky notices that Steve has been pushing a tiny bit closer to the much thicker third bead with every pass, and now he’s gotten it close enough that Bucky is starting to feel the unfamiliar territory of a new stretch.

“Oh…”

“Yeah, feel that, baby?” Steve pushes it in until it’s nearing the widest point of the new notch. “You ready for a little more?”

 _“Yes_ , Daddy,” Bucky gasps. “Please.”

It definitely feels like more than two fingers when the third bead pushes past Bucky’s rim, but the stretch of it is _delicious_. Bucky cants his hips downward.

“Oh, _fuck,_ yes, yes, Daddy— _yes!”_

Bucky hears Steve chuckle as he pushes the toy all the way in to the skinny divot between this bead and the final, big notch—the only part of the toy that’s left between the base and his hole. Steve pauses to let Bucky recover from the novel sensation before he begins the slow, sweet process of pulling it out like he’s done a few dozen times already. The girth and the silicone bumps feel just as good sliding out as they do when a notch pops inside. Bucky’s throat feels like it’s already going raw from moaning.

“That’s right,” Steve rumbles, pulling the toy out to the tip before slowly pushing it past those one, two, and then three notches again. “Time for Daddy to get to play a little, I think. Will you be a sweet boy and hold your legs back so I can have my fun, too?”

It takes a monumental effort with _that_ kind of filthy talk in his ears, but Bucky gathers what’s left of his brain and does what Steve has asked, putting his hands behind his thighs and pulling them into his chest. He’s exposed like this— _so_ exposed—but in the short time he’s been with Steve, Bucky has learned to embrace the vulnerable feelings and just let his Daddy take care of him.

“Good _boy,_ ” Steve groans, sitting up on his knees, peering down at where he’s pulling and pressing on the dildo. “Look at this, sweetheart. You’re learning how to be greedy already. Sucking your new toy right inside…”

Bucky wants to squeeze his eyes shut and try to find some way to cope with the slew of incredible sensation, but he can’t, not when he’s got a hulking beast of a man kneeling between his legs and looking down at him like he’s prey, saying sweet things, calling himself _Daddy_. Bucky never wants to close his eyes again.

“Here you go,” Steve coos. He gives his own cock a few long, hard strokes before letting it hang heavy between his legs again, and then he takes over holding one of Bucky’s thighs back. “Touch yourself while Daddy plays with you.”

The pink heat burning in his cheeks and spreading down his neck and chest makes it hard to do anything but sink deeper into the mattress, but Bucky finds a way to do as he’s told. He’s a good boy, after all.

Steve gives him a little smear of lube for Bucky’s newly freed hand to wrap around his own cock. Bucky means to start off with the slow pulls that always look so sexy when Steve does it, but that plan disintegrates the second he gets his palm on his dick.

“Eager little thing,” Steve smirks, watching Bucky’s hand fly over his shaft without hesitation.

_“Daddy…”_

“I’m right here, sweetheart. Don’t stop. Show Daddy how you make it feel good.”

There’s a hot coil in Bucky’s lower belly, and it tightens every time Steve pulls one of those bumps out and then pushes it back in. He’s focusing on just that thick, third notch now, stretching Bucky with it and rubbing his thumb over the strained rim. Bucky wishes he could see it.

“You’re opening up so sweet for me,” Steve praises. “What do you think—are we ready for the big one?”

Bucky moans in shocked pleasure at the question; he had forgotten there was still one more notch, still one big bead for Steve to push into him, thick as three of Steve’s fingers.

“Yes, _yes,”_ Bucky gasps, squeezing his eyes shut as he continues to frantically jerk himself off and fill the room with the wet, squelching sounds of lube on his cock.

He expects Steve to go ahead and just push the last notch in, but he doesn’t. He pulls the whole toy out instead and starts fucking him with the length of it, angling it so that it hits Bucky’s prostate _every_ time and making Bucky cry out over and over.

“Oh, baby boy. Getting close?”

Bucky nods his head desperately, and he speeds up his hand at the exact same moment Steve suddenly pushes past his rim with that last notch and oh, _oh,_ it’s a stretch, and it’s a tingling kind of burn, and it’s the biggest thing Bucky’s ever had inside him and it is so fucking _good._

“Unh, Daddy, I— _Fuck!”_

“Goddamn, sweetheart,” Steve laughs. “There you go. Mess up your belly for me.”

It feels amazing to have something big and thick inside him to clench down on while his dick spills onto his own stomach. Steve doesn’t remove the toy, and the whole orgasm feels a hundred times better when he can squeeze on it and feel one of the notches pressing right into his prostate, prolonging the feeling for him, pushing out more strings of milky white. Bucky feels like it’s forever until he’s done coming; even then, the aftershocks are a sensation all on their own.

He hasn’t even fully come down when he feels Steve suddenly pull out the entire length of the silicone, tossing it onto the towel at the foot of the bed. Bucky moans at the unexpected feeling of emptiness. He looks down to find Steve still kneeling with a hand on his own cock, holding Bucky’s leg over and back and looking straight down and _fuck_ , Bucky’s face fills with an entirely different kind of heat when he realizes how obscene that view must be.

“Daddy…” he protests weakly, but he doesn’t even think about moving.

Steve’s face flashes with a predatory look, and then he speeds up his hand, staring downward again.

“You are a fuckin’ miracle, Buck. _Goddamn._ Wish you could see your pretty, wet hole right now.”

An idea pops into Bucky’s head, and he knows all of his thoughts are fuck-stupid right now, but he goes with it.

“Yeah?” he breathes, trying his best to make his voice drip with sex and probably failing, but he can’t care. “Want you to _come_ , Daddy. Want you to...” and his tongue gets tripped up, but he recovers, “Want you to come on my p-pretty, wet hole—”

_“—Fuck!”_

Bucky’s more than a little shocked that his terrible attempt at dirty talk actually worked, but it clearly did _something,_ because now Steve’s enormous cock is spurting endless ropes across Bucky’s lower half. The first of it soaks Bucky’s softening dick, and that’s a new kind of erotic Bucky never knew he wanted because _fuck_ , it looks like his Daddy owns his cock now, and he wants to see that again and again.

Steve’s still gushing come, and now he’s groaning and growling and pushing Bucky’s thigh back so he can come right on his stretched out hole and he’s actually doing it, he’s _doing what Bucky asked for_ and—

“Oh my—Daddy, _yes_ , please, want it—!”

“Fuck yes you do,” Steve growls through gritted teeth. “Gonna mark you up with me.”

The sticky-hot come feels searing everywhere it lands on Bucky’s skin and rim. Steve’s cock goes on and on like it so often does, but when he’s finally spent and dropping himself from his hold, his energy level doesn’t wane. He pushes Bucky’s thigh back even further and starts thumbing around his hole, a rumbling sound pouring from his chest as he _pushes his own come inside Bucky_ and it’s so much, it’s so heady, and Bucky just came but he’s more turned on than he’s ever been. He can do nothing but lay back while Steve uses two fingers to tucks his own spend inside him like that’s just where it belongs.

“So fucking good for me,” Steve groans. “Tiny fuckin’ hole, perfect place to hold my come. So gorgeous, so sexy. See how much Daddy had for you?”

Bucky releases his grip on his own leg at the same time Steve lets the other go, and his limbs fall to the bed, spread, knees wide and bent with his feet flat on the mattress. He gives into the strange urge blooming inside him to run his hands down his own body and get his fingers sticky with the cooling come that covers his lower half. His fingertips slither down to his balls, right above the place where Steve still hasn’t stopped playing with him. There’s enough of Steve’s come in him now that Bucky can feel it leaking back out each time Steve pushes more in.

“Wanna rub it in, Daddy,” Bucky moans, feeling languid and used and like every bone in his body was made to be perfect.

“Yeah?” Steve husks. “Go ahead. Let me see.”

Bucky smiles lazily and widens the spread of his legs just to look sultry and loose. The blackening of Steve’s eyes tells him he must be doing a good job.

“There you go,” Steve growls, staring at all the places where Bucky is smearing copious amounts of Steve’s come into the skin of his lower stomach, his balls, the inside of his thighs. “Such a smart boy.”

Bucky feels Steve slip fingers inside him again, but this time it’s three. His jaw falls open in shocked pleasure at the feeling; it’s the same girth as the big bead on the dildo, but it’s better, because it’s Steve’s warm flesh instead of lifeless silicone.

“So wet in this hole,” Steve murmurs over the sound of lewd squelching. Bucky moans when Steve teases over his prostate, but it’s just a tease; they both know he’s still too sensitive after the assault Steve just waged on his sweet spot only moments ago. “So wet. Can’t hardly wait ‘til I get my cock in you and feel how sweet you are around me.” He pulls his fingers out and reaches for something on the far end of the towel. “I’ll make sure you get to keep everything you’ve earned.”

Bucky doesn’t catch Steve’s meaning at first; he’s too busy shutting his eyes and tossing his head back against the pillow when Steve scoops more of his come into Bucky’s hole, and then the fingers are gone, replaced by something that feels hard and rubbery. For a moment, Bucky thinks Steve has gotten the beads out again, but then he remembers the other thing Steve told him to grab off the countertop and—

“Hold still, baby boy,” Steve tells him as he pushes the plug in slowly. “You can take this. Just as big as my three fingers.”

The sound Bucky makes is mortifying when he realizes Steve is using one of the new training toys—the medium-sized plug—to keep Bucky full of his come.

 _“Fuck,_ Daddy,” he whimpers. “Yeah, let’s… Want to.”

Steve is right; the plug is pretty easy to take now that Bucky has had the beads and the fingers. He feels strangely proud of himself as the widest part pushes past his rim and fills him up. There’s a long but narrow silicone handle that settles nicely between his cheeks; a good plug for wearing, Steve had said.

“Yeah?” Steve grins, playing with the base lightly now that the toy is snug inside him. “Wanna walk around full of your Daddy’s come?”

Bucky smiles when he nods. He knows it probably looks like he’s drunk, neck purple and red and nothing less than debauched.

He’s got his Daddy’s come in him, and soon he’ll be ready for Daddy’s cock.

Bucky really likes his life.

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

**s t e v e**

n o v e m b e r 2, 2 0 2 5

| 225 days until harvest |

“You have an attic.”

Steve stops walking. He looks up at the hallway’s ceiling and the little square at the center that has suddenly attracted Bucky’s attention.

“I do,” he agrees.

They’re upstairs, and they’ve just emerged from Steve’s room, where Bucky had been perfectly compliant in bending over the bathroom sink so Steve could gently remove their latest venture with training plugs. Now, Bucky has stopped on their way down to the kitchen to peer up at the entry to an attic he has apparently never noticed before.

“Do you ever go up there?” Bucky asks, turning to Steve.

“Been up a couple of times,” he answers. “Right after I bought this place.”

“Oh.” Bucky’s eyes return to the ceiling. “What’s in it?”

Steve can’t deny that he adores when Bucky gets that expression on his face: eyes wide, lips slightly parted, head cocked to the side. It’s a look that says, _‘I don’t know what this is, but I want to.’_

“Nothing of mine, actually. The old couple that lived here before me built this house, and they were here for sixty years. I found boxes and boxes of their old things up there.” Steve pauses, remembering how bewildered he had felt to find the forgotten evidence of someone’s entire lifetime. “I contacted their children—the ones who sold me this place after their parents died—but they didn’t want it. Said I should chuck it. Couldn’t bring myself to do that, I guess.”

Bucky watches Steve’s face while he speaks. He’s been doing that more and more lately: not allowing himself to get drawn into other busy distractions while Steve is talking. Steve can’t help but wonder if it’s a learned habit born of their dynamic in the bedroom.

He likes it.

“What kind of stuff?”

“A lot of ugly porcelain collectibles, mostly,” Steve laughs. “I also saw a wedding dress. And there are boxes and boxes of records.”

“Records?” Bucky repeats with interest. “Like the vinyl kind?”

Steve gives him a crooked grin. “I’m surprised you even know what those are.”

Bucky scoffs, hand to his heart.

“Of course I do. I’m offended you would think I didn’t.”

Steve chuckles. He gestures up to the square in the ceiling.

“Wanna take a peek?” he asks, seeing an opportunity for Bucky to scratch his ever-present itch of curiosity. “I haven’t been up there in two years.”

Bucky’s face brightens when he nods. To Steve, the expression alone is worth having extended the offer.

“Okay. Move back a bit so I can get the ladder down.”

Steve reaches up to grab the hook on the vertical door, pulling it down to find the rickety, wooden extension ladder. It doesn’t look in any better shape than the last time Steve saw it. He makes sure Bucky is clear of its path as it slides down.

“You first,” Steve instructs, gripping various poles on the ladder and pulling to test their integrity—for Bucky’s safety. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Bucky narrows his eyes and quirks up his lips as he steps onto the first rung.

“You just want to look at my ass,” he mutters with a wink, and Steve can’t help but laugh.

“Sweetheart… I have never pretended otherwise.”

Bucky stands up at the top of his climb, looking around, covering his mouth.

“Damn, I—” he coughs. “Ton ‘a dust up here.”

Steve emerges next to him, echoing Bucky’s cough with one of his own. He finds himself glancing towards the small window facing the field outside.

“Yeah,” he says, talking more to himself than anything else. “They left behind a lot of that.”

He looks on as Bucky begins sorting through the mess of things: porcelain cats, a yellowed chiffon dress, dilapidated board games. It doesn’t take long for him to zero in on the decades of music carefully sorted and boxed away, and as he watches Bucky rifle through them, Steve realizes that he doesn’t really know why he hasn’t thrown them out. Perhaps it’s because he can tell just by looking at everything that it was quite well-loved by its owners. These things were special to someone. They cared for their records even when they were negligent stewards of their land.

While Steve hasn’t thrown them out, he also hasn’t done anything with them, save for leaving them to rot in his attic. It’s not like he recognizes any of the music; for as impressive of a collection as it is, it doesn’t include the _Trouble Man_ soundtrack.

“This is so cool,” Bucky gushes, thumbing through one of the many boxes. He looks up at Steve. “Do you think there’s a record player up here?”

Steve smirks.

“How do you know there’s not one downstairs?”

Bucky’s entire countenance lights up. There’s just enough of a glow filtering in through the dusty attic window for Steve to see his pretty eyes get big and wide.

“Oh, that’s so cool! That’s—Can we take these downstairs and play them?”

 _“All_ of them?” Steve laughs. “That might take you a while.”

Bucky makes a thin line of his mouth. He turns, hands on his hips, scanning over his finds.

“You’re right. Let’s start with these five boxes,” he says, and Steve Rogers is a man in love.

—

They make lunch—Steve makes lunch—and the rest of their Sunday afternoon is spent with Bucky poring over the dusty, old vinyl collection. It turns out that listening to them is interesting for them both, in their own individual ways. Steve has always thought of music as the dominion of the day’s youth; people fall in love with the songs of their own coming-of-age years, and then one day they’re grown, making way for the younger generation to create sounds of their own. But the music kept inside those dusty cardboard boxes is new to Steve and old to Bucky, snapshots from a time that belonged to neither of them. In listening to these songs together, experiencing it for the first time as one unit, the music starts to belong to them both.

Steve smiles to himself while throwing together their half dozen sandwiches, and Bucky stays busy putting on album after album with a big, happy grin of his own. Steve would be lying if he said his attention was more on the music than on Bucky— _Bucky,_ his beautiful lover who listens to each track with closed eyes, humming in the warm tone of borrowed nostalgia, singing in sepia with a bottle of beer in his hand—but he’s grown accustomed to dealing with the ache that’s always there, deep in his bones, whenever Bucky is around and Steve’s isn’t touching him.

Over the past week, they’ve settled smoothly into a sensual, playful routine of trying out new ways to work Bucky open, and Steve’s been surprised to find that Bucky has stopped acting quite so impatient about getting Steve inside him. Plugs, dildos, sometimes a narrow massager slipped in alongside; Steve thinks Bucky must have realized how much of a stretch it really can be to take something bigger than he’s taken before, as they’ve progressively had Bucky do. He seems to understand why Steve had been so insistent on waiting that first night Bucky had crawled into his bed.

“Oh, hey,” Bucky says, picking a new album with a faded cover from his latest open box. “My mom loves this guy.”

Steve peers over. Bucky likes the folksy tunes the best, which means they’re also Steve’s favorite, but this is another album he’s not familiar with: Bob Dylan’s _Planet Waves_.

“I’ve heard of the guy,” Steve says, reading down the tracklist over Bucky’s shoulder as he presses a chaste kiss to his temple. “Don’t think I know any of these songs, though.”

Bucky changes out the album on the record player just after the final song on the last one ends, carefully tucking the first back into its sleeve. He settles the Dylan disk on the wheel and expertly places the needle. The plucky sounds of an acoustic guitar and harmonica fill the living room.

“Wow,” Bucky giggles. “I think I remember someone playing this in the car when I was a kid.”

It’s interesting to Steve how sometimes Bucky talks about his family with sadness in his eyes, and other times he doesn’t. This isn’t one of those times. It’s almost as if he doesn’t always remember that he’s in a permanent state of dissociation from them; as if, at any moment, his mother or his sister might come knocking on the front door, waiting to embrace him.

Steve sits himself down on the couch, a beer of his own in his hand, legs comfortably spread apart. It’s not long after when Bucky decides to rinse the dust off his hands and join him.

He tucks himself under Steve’s arm, turning into him.

“Can I have a sip?” he asks, gesturing to Steve’s beer with the tip of his nose.

Steve chuckles. “You have the same beer in your hand.”

“I know,” Bucky shrugs. “But I want a sip of yours.”

Steve smirks. He tries to roll his eyes, but his heart is too fond for sarcasm right now.

“Here.” Steve tips the neck of the bottle to Bucky’s mouth and waits to hear the swallow. “Happy?”

Bucky smacks his lips, grinning.

“Very. Thank you.”

And Steve… He can do nothing but lean in for a kiss.

They talk about music and nothing at all as they absorb each other’s easy warmth. The vinyl spins through different tempos, fast and then slow, then slower, and then the fastest yet. The final track is the gentlest of them all, and it catches Steve’s ear for some reason. He leans over to grab the jacket atop the coffee table and finds that the listing reads, ‘Forever Young.’ Apparently this Dylan character has a faster version somewhere, because it specifies that this track is ‘slow.’

Bucky is quietly humming the tune to himself when he spots Steve raising an eyebrow before setting down their beers on the side table and pulling them both up to standing.

“What are we doing?” Bucky asks.

“Dancing,” Steve responds with a shrug, as though the answer should have been obvious.

Bucky’s eyes get big and bright. A smile takes over his face as he watches Steve push the coffee table out of the way.

“But I thought Steve Rogers didn’t know how to dance?” he teases.

Steve laughs; he has to. He’s never burdened Bucky with knowing everything about where he’s been and what he’s done and seen, and he probably never will. But Steve also thinks that Bucky knows enough of it: enough to sense when stories are important and when they are not, and when the moments happening in the ‘ _now’_ mean more.

“Guess that bit is probably in all the books and movies they made about me?”

“Nah, not all of them,” Bucky smirks, taking Steve’s hand. “Just the unauthorized biographies.”

“Figures,” Steve chuckles. “There was definitely once truth to that. Took me a good long while, but I eventually got around to learning. An old friend. But I…” He trails off, looking down at their joined hands. Steve feels himself get as close to blushing as he has in more than eighty years. “I only know how to follow.”

Bucky’s entire expression softens at the admission. Steve braces himself for more gentle teasing, but then Bucky wraps an arm around his waist and lifts their hands up to their sides. He does absolutely nothing to hide his half-shy smile.

“My mom taught me,” Bucky says. “And I only know how to lead.”

Something immense and powerful makes itself known in Steve’s chest. He cranes his head down to look at Bucky, who peers up at him, face inches apart. The fact that their lips could be touching if Steve bent downward is almost more intimate than it if they were to close the distance.

“Is… Is that okay?” Bucky asks, chewing on that bottom lip again. “If I lead?”

The powerful feeling in his chest ruptures bright like a flare from the surface of the sun.

“After what you’ve done for me? For this farm?” Steve smiles. “I’m still a soldier, sweetheart. I’d follow you anywhere.”

It turns out that Bucky is quite a good dancer. Steve is only as good as he’s ever been, but it’s enough to keep up with Bucky’s easy lead and the slow tempo of the song. Bucky’s hand is on Steve’s lower back while Steve keeps his flat against the back of Bucky’s shoulder, rubbing his thumb back and forth across the soft fabric of his shirt. They’re probably closer than a more traditional partners’ dance would call for, but Steve feels like he could twist someone’s limb if they were to try and put another inch between his body and Bucky’s. He stares down, captured by trust and gray.

His man is so, _so_ very beautiful. It almost hurts to take it in.

“When did this old friend of yours teach you how to follow?”

The corner of Steve’s mouth ticks up. He breaks their eye contact and casts a look over Bucky’s shoulder, peering off into another chapter of reality; another place in time.

“Went and visited her for a while after the war was over. She didn’t let me leave until I could at least pass for having a matching pair of feet, ‘stead of two left ones.”

Steve’s eyes drift back to where they belong. It’s clear from the depth in Bucky’s face that he knows Steve is not talking about the war in Nazi Germany.

“Who was she?” Bucky asks, voice soft.

Steve can’t stop the soft smile on his face. He doesn’t want to.

“Someone who knew how to lead better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Bucky smiles back; he likes that answer. It does something to Steve to see his lover caring to know what might be hiding inside him, and perhaps Steve doesn’t always want Bucky to see it—but this?

This, Steve shares.

“What was she like?” Bucky asks. “Peggy Carter.”

Steve’s face goes fond, for Peggy and for Bucky. Of course he wants to know more about her.

“She was an amazing person,” Steve answers. “People always call her ‘strong,’ but that doesn’t do her justice. She was fierce. She was flawed. She didn’t always make the right decisions. But she always did what she did out of passion.” He pauses, laughing softly to himself. “She never did something for the sake of doing it.”

Dylan’s chorus comes in again, and Steve can tell the song is coming to a close. He hopes Bucky will flip the record to the other side and ask Steve if he wants to go again.

“Your scars.”

Steve almost startles, and his feet skip a beat. He follows Bucky’s eyes where they’re staring at their joined hands, at the red network of cracked-open blood vessels sprawling beneath Steve’s skin.

“Lightning,” he answers, flat. “Like I said.”

A soft, instrumental interlude follows the chorus, and Bucky goes quiet along with it. Steve can tell he’s still thinking.

“Did that happen to Captain America?” Bucky asks, breaking his own silence. “Or did that happen to Steve Rogers?”

Steve’s first answer is a dry laugh.

“Who’s to say?” he says, even when he knows damn well that _he_ is.

The song ends, as does the first side of the album, and Bucky stops leading their gentle sway. They don’t separate.

“Thanos?” Bucky whispers, as though he’s afraid the world will hear him share Steve’s secrets.

Steve shakes his head.

“He was there,” he says. “But it was me who did it to myself.”

“Oh.” The lip between Bucky’s teeth says he’s feeling thoughtful. “Um… How?”

It takes Steve a moment to decide how to answer, or if he even should. He sighs, letting go of Bucky’s hand to go down on the couch, legs wide so his elbows can lean on his knees as he hunches forward and hangs his head towards the ground.

The fact is that, while Steve may not deserve him, he still wants Bucky to be with him; to stay _with_ him. He wants Bucky in his life for as long as Bucky wants to be a part of it. What he doesn’t want is for Bucky to realize that Steve Rogers is more of a fraud than the world has ever known him to be.

But—more than any of that—Steve also doesn’t want to lie. He can’t.

They’ve been listening to records all afternoon, basking in each other’s easy company. It gets dark early these days now that they’ve set their clocks back an hour, and the sun outside the west-facing windows is disappearing behind the faraway hills as the day’s sunset becomes the day’s last light. It feels too apt to Steve.

“They call it ‘Mjölnir,’” he answers, finally. “On Asgard.”

Steve raises his head. He’s stone-faced and hollow, but at least he’s still an honest man.

“Asgard?” Bucky repeats, but it’s only seconds before Steve sees the connection form in his mind. “Like… Like _Thor?_ His hammer?”

Steve nods, looking back at the rug. He idly cracks his knuckles.

“The one and only.”

“But I thought the whole thing with the, um… Myo-nir—his hammer, whatever—was that you could only pick it up if you’re some sort of—or, like…”

“Worthy?” Steve supplies. He can hear the darkness in his own tone. “Yeah.”

Bucky gives him a funny giggle that feels out of place in the room. Steve raises his head to watch it bubble out of him.

“That sounds so… _silly_ ,” Bucky laughs.

And Steve can’t deny it. Maybe he’d laugh, too, if the word didn’t hurt him to hear.

“It does,” he agrees. “But it’s true. I’ve seen it.”

“And you…” Bucky pauses, eyeing Steve’s scars in awe as everything clicks in his head with dawning awe. “You picked it _up?”_

It occurs to Steve that he could still stop. He could pull the brakes here. Steve could backtrack.

“I did,” he answers instead. “I fought Thanos with it in my hand.”

Bucky smiles through his confusion.

“But that’s really cool. If you picked it up, that means you’re like… a god, or something. Right? You’re _worthy.”_

Steve lifts his heavy arm and gestures to his web of fault lines and scarred skin: stolen lightning reserved for good men, a hammer with an invisible chisel for any imposter who would dare to lift it. The marks are red, and they’re grim, and they are thunder and consonance turned noise and dissonance.

“Doesn’t seem like I am, Buck.”

Bucky goes silent.

Steve looks away.

After a long while, Steve hears soft footsteps approaching him. The cushion beside him sinks under Bucky’s weight.

“I didn’t drop out of school because my dad found out I was gay,” Bucky says. There’s a tint of shame in his soft voice. “I dropped out six months before that.”

Steve turns his head. He doesn’t ask ‘why;’ he knows the expression on his face says that Bucky can tell him whatever he wants, and he expects none of whatever he doesn’t.

Bucky looks down at his own fidgeting hands and shrugs at Steve’s wordless response.

“It was too hard to get back into it. After the Blip.”

Steve’s stomach roils with a suppressed and angry violence, something lain hidden in his core.

He can’t—he thought he had moved past this, at least enough to make life work. _Bucky_ had helped him move past this. But now Steve knows that the Snap had ripped Bucky from his own place in time and taken away his time completely, and, fuck, what else could possibly have happened once he’d returned? How could he have assimilated back into a five-year-late life as though the world hadn’t stood and walked forward without him and lived on like nothing had happened? Bucky—

“Steve?”

—Bucky left school because of what _Steve_ couldn’t do. His failure goes deeper. He’d found Bucky wandering without his own life, without a future, without a place. All of that means the wound is still bleeding, a wound in _Bucky’s_ flesh, and now Bucky won’t even accept that Steve was the one who put it there—

“Steve, hey, no”—and there’s a hand on his thunder-marked forearm— _“No_ , don’t do that.”

He wants to break something. He’s scared he will. He’s—

“Steve! Stop!”

The turbulent thread of thought breaks. Steve returns to the living room. He looks down.

He’s torn a hole in the upholstery.

“I…” he breathes, uncurling his fist and shaking his head slowly. He turns to Bucky. “I didn’t mean to—to go—” he croaks, and what is that? Whose voice is this? “I’m… I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

But Bucky doesn’t look scared or angry. His brow is knitted deeply, eyes wide, and if he is afraid, then it’s not for himself.

“Don’t _do_ that,” Bucky says tightly, squeezing Steve’s arm. “I know where you’re going in your head. Don’t.”

Steve doesn’t respond. He’s too busy welcoming Bucky into his arms as he crawls onto Steve’s lap. He’s too busy closing his eyes and breathing out, wrapping himself around Bucky’s small frame and burying his nose in Bucky’s neck as Bucky does the same to him. He’s too busy listening to the sweet, whispered voice in his ear.

“It’s okay,” the voice promises. “It’s okay.”

And—by a miracle of some wholly graceless God—Steve believes it.

His heart slows more with each second Bucky spends in his arms. His skin tingles and buzzes everywhere Bucky touches it: the nape of his neck, the ridge of his cheek. He even traces his fingertips over the histories written on his arm, and Steve wants to believe that each point of contact can be absolution, if only because Bucky wills it to be.

“Look, Steve,” Bucky says, turning towards the west-facing window. “Snow.”

Steve does look. The sun has practically set; only the bright edge is visible peeking out above the distant hills before it lays itself down to sleep. Snowflakes tremble down from clouds illuminated from beneath by the waning light.

Bucky stands, tugging Steve up with him. He follows Bucky to the window, where he slides his arms around his waist from behind as Bucky gets up close to the glass.

“‘S pretty,” Bucky murmurs.

Steve kisses the hair on the crown on his head.

“It is.”

They’re just mid-Autumn flurries—they probably won’t leave an inch on the ground—but they’re a majestic sight nonetheless with the white crystals floating down onto their budding fields. It’s a strange dichotomy: knowing that the world outside is below freezing while Bucky is so warm in his hold.

“My, um. My mom,” Bucky starts after a long period of shared quiet. “She’s not perfect, but she always had this one saying. She said you can’t look right into the sunset, because the light will burn your eyes. So… you have to face east, right?”

Bucky turns away from the window in the circle of Steve’s arms; he turns east. Instead of looking up, he tucks his forehead against Steve’s chest and stares down the gap between them, eyes on their feet.

“And when you do,” he says, speaking to the floor, “you can look at the ground, and you can see your own shadow.”

He pauses, but Steve knows he isn’t done. Bucky raises his head after a contemplative silence and gazes up at Steve. Those stormy gray eyes are filled with luminance, iridescence, splintered rays of shining light.

“Or—Mom would say—you can look in front of you.” His lashes kiss his cheeks in butterfly pulses every time he blinks. “And ‘God’s light at your back will show you everything.’”

The corner of Bucky’s mouth tilts up; a half-smile, something far away and sad and perhaps laughing. Steve splays his fingers out over the subtle curvature of Bucky’s waist, grazing his warmth through his shirt.

“I don’t believe in God, Steve. I can’t.” Bucky’s palms leave Steve’s chest and cup either side of his neck. “But I believe that there are few people in this universe as worthy of anything as you. You have spent your whole _life_ doing things for other people,” he says. “Maybe I spent five years in dust, but you spent seventy years in ice. You chose to die so that other people could live—and not just those people, but future people, too. People like me. But it didn’t stop there, did it?” His fingertips tickle the hair curled around Steve’s ears. “No. You braced yourself for death, and then death never came. But it wasn’t like… like you got to just go home instead and live out your life. You woke up in a different life. And that wasn’t fair to you.” Bucky laughs softly, but there’s no humor in it. He averts his eyes. “You probably think death would have been easier.”

Steve raises one hand to hold the side of Bucky’s smooth face, bringing their eyes back together, trying to pour his heart out in the truth behind his own.

“Found you here in this lifetime,” Steve says. “Everything I’ve done was worth every damn second.”

Bucky stares back at him, lips apart, and then he smiles in that radiant way he does whenever he’s feeling happiness next to other emotions. His gray eyes crinkle at the same time that his brow furrows.

“You sacrificed your life _and_ your death for the world, Steve. If that’s not worthy…” Bucky shakes his head gently. “Then I don’t know what is.”

Steve takes in the curves and colors of his lover’s features, and his insides sear with the realization that—after all this—he’s been too quick to forget what it is he’s always fought for. Life. Love. Simple things.

“I want to believe that.”

“Then _believe_ it,” Bucky pleads, suddenly urgent. He brushes his thumb against the underside of Steve’s jaw, caressing the scruff of his beard. “You never let yourself have what you want. What do you want?”

But _‘what do you need?’_ is what Steve hears instead, and his body answers with a visceral necessity coursing through his blood, bursting bright into chaotic, endless love.

And then Steve’s breath isn’t stone-still anymore.

He feels hungry and boundless as he moves muscles for both of them, caging Bucky’s much smaller form against the window. He takes his jaw in a firm but gentle grip, pressing his weight against the glass pane with his other palm, giving Bucky a scant inch of space to breathe in something that isn’t attached to Steve.

“I want to see our wheat wake up green,” Steve husks. “And turn gold. I want to hold you and kiss you.” He tightens his shallow grip on Bucky’s jaw until it’s exacting, rubbing his thumb over Bucky’s slick lower lip as he growls out the rest. “I want to take your virginity in my bed and know that I’m the only one who you let have it. I want to make you _mine_ in a way no one else ever will.”

Bucky’s eyes are wide as saucers, the gray in them gone black. His breathing is heavy; exhales filled with the weight of shared lust.

The maddening surges along the livewire of Steve’s spine fizzle suddenly, as does the ferocity in his hold.

“I want to make love to you, Buck.” He strokes that hand along Bucky’s cheek. “And then I want to love you. For as long as you’ll let me.”

Something brilliant lights up beneath Bucky’s skin. It’s amazement, and it’s elation, and it’s a stunned kind of awe that seeps from his pores and brightens the air around them.

“You… You love me?” he breathes.

Steve slides the hand on Bucky’s waist around to his back and brings their bodies closer, ghosting his lips over Bucky’s.

“I do,” he answers, more honestly than he’s uttered any other two words in his life. “I love you. And I don’t need you to say it back—not if you’re not ready. Not ever, even.” He brings their foreheads together and closes his eyes. “But I love you, sweetheart. And I want you to know it.”

There’s a stretch of time when all they do is breathe each other in. Steve knows without needing to see it that Bucky’s eyes are closed, too, and he knows when Bucky opens them back up. His eyelashes brush against Steve’s nose.

“Then do it,” Bucky whispers—begs—when Steve’s eyes open as well. “Make love to me _,_ Steve. I’m ready. _We’re_ ready.”

And Steve knows that Bucky is speaking to the truth. He knows that Bucky’s body—his mind, too—will never be more ready to take Steve inside him than it is now. He knows that Bucky has waited long enough, and that Steve would be cruel to keep withholding what he knows they’re both yearning to share. He _knows._

But first, Steve needs to let something go. He needs to make promises that are as much for himself as they are for Bucky, perhaps more, and he’ll use this silence to make his promises now. He’ll vow to them—if only on the inside.

He’ll exonerate this guilt and let himself have the parts of life he touches. He will leave what’s gone and dead where it should be; he’ll bury it. He’ll lift up his shovel and dig it deep in the dirt and burrow down to a part of his soul he doesn’t ever need to see again, and he will swear that it’s the final resting place of something that doesn’t belong. He’ll remold the definition of _having_ until he can swear it means _deserving_.

Steve’s eyes leave Bucky’s beautiful face only long enough to look beyond the glass and towards the final edge of the sun falling beneath the rolling hills. He feels the last of the day’s light on his face.

He’ll swear it; all of it. He’ll swear that Bucky will be his, and loved, and forever safe. But he won’t swear it to God, because that would be useless and empty.

Steve will swear it to the earth.

In one swift symphony of shared motion, he lifts Bucky’s legs and wraps them around his waist, growling his approval as Bucky’s arms instinctively circle his neck. He captures Bucky’s mouth in a brutally sweet kiss as he hoists Bucky’s easy weight with Steve’s hands on his waist.

“Hold onto me, sweetheart,” he whispers.

And he walks them to the stairs.


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

**b u c k y**

n o v e m b e r 2, 2 0 2 5

| 225 days until harvest |

Steve doesn’t rush ridding Bucky of his clothes.

There’s something different about his energy tonight; something deeper. Bucky knows it before Steve even gets them to the bed because his kisses and embraces are full of an intensity that lasts for more than just the half-life of simple lust.

It’s love, Bucky realizes.

Because Steve is in love with him.

Bucky knows he’s trembling. He’s not anxious—not really—but he’s more than just excited. He’s pressed beneath the heavy weight of emotion pouring down on him as Steve spreads his naked body across the sheets. He’s shaking from the promise and sensual purpose he feels in the heat of Steve’s breath, lips trailing from Bucky’s neck, down his side, to his hip bone, kissing every bit of skin along the way. His muscles quiver; the dual sensations of Steve’s mouth ghosting over his navel while his hand brushes the inside of his thigh are so heady that Bucky cannot contain his body’s responses.

Steve is in love with him.

Now, Steve is going to _make_ love to him.

“You’re alright, sweetheart,” he whispers against Bucky’s lips. “You’re alright. I’m here,” and Bucky whimpers back until he gets a deep kiss.

Steve feels bigger than he ever has with his mass of muscle and power settled between Bucky’s thighs, cock resting heavy against his own. A thrill—an instinctual response to this soft, tender domination—chases after the molasses flowing down his spine.

“Going to open you up right,” Steve promises, breathing into the hollow of his neck. He can’t seem to separate his lips from Bucky’s skin. “Going to make this so good for you.”

The bottle of slick appears from nowhere, or maybe it just feels that way because Bucky’s eyes won’t stop fluttering open and shut. The static noise in his ears has him pinned to the bed and feeling weightless at the same time. He’s blissfully underwater.

“Steve...”

And then Steve is there, kissing him, and this time he’s got not one but two gentle fingers pressing wetly around his rim. The first one slips in easily, and then Steve surprises Bucky by allowing the second to join less than a minute later—or so it feels, if time still works how Bucky remembers.

“Beautiful baby,” Steve breathes, working in and around the slightly lax muscle. “Still sweet for me from this morning, aren’t you?”

Bucky’s face stretches into what must be a goofy-looking smile. He doesn’t care. His brain may be slow, but he recalls how Steve had played with him earlier, fingering him and holding him open with their biggest plug.

He’s good for Steve.

Bucky can take two fingers easy.

“Mm-hm,” he hums, intoxicated but perfect even in his own ears. “Sweet. Sweet for you.”

Steve lets out an intensely erotic sound with his mouth against Bucky’s sensitive, peaked nipple.

“I— _oh!”_ Bucky hiccups when Steve curls his fingers inside him. Sparks shoot from his tailbone to his neck.

“Do you know how many times I’m going to make you come tonight?” Steve rasps, words sweltering against Bucky’s cheek as he peppers hot kisses up and down the side of his face.

“Fuck,” Bucky whimpers. “I—”

“I’m going to show you how good it can feel to have someone inside you who loves you.” Steve’s voice is just a whisper at this point, but it’s everything that matters in the world breathed right into Bucky’s ear. “I’m going to take you apart.”

_“Steve.”_

Steve groans, increasing the pace of his fingers so suddenly that Bucky isn’t sure he means to do it. The sensation is extraordinary.

“That’s right, sweet boy.” He nips at Bucky’s chin, slowing his now frantic fingers as he sucks Bucky’s lower lip into his mouth, growling, “You know who’s going to have you tonight.”

The words hit Bucky right where he lives. His legs bend and hook around Steve’s thighs of their own accord, pressing their cocks together harder. Bucky can feel them leaking onto each other.

“Are you ready for the next one?” Steve asks, a third fingertip pressing at his rim.

Bucky nods so desperately that he almost knocks their skulls together. He loves getting three fingers. It’s still the most he’s ever had—Steve has teased him with the tip of a fourth, but they’ve never tried to take it all the way—and the stretch is always tremendous and golden.

Steve presses the new finger in fully at the same time that he reaches between their slick bodies. He leans back onto his knees to support himself while he takes Bucky’s dick in hand, rubbing the pad of his thumb over the wet head.

“Do you want to come now?” he asks. "Wanna take the edge off for you before we give you all four?”

And _oh,_ fuck, a part of Bucky wants to say yes. A part of Bucky wants to spill right now just thinking about how Steve isn’t saying that they’re going to _try_ for four fingers, but that Bucky is going to _get_ four—because Bucky is actually going to take Steve inside him tonight.

“I… No,” he answers, breathless. “Want to come on your cock.”

Bucky sees and feels Steve’s whole body shudder. He also hears Steve’s wicked growl.

Steve removes his hand from Bucky’s dick and leans down on his elbow, lowering himself again and kissing Bucky’s lips. The three fingers inside him are now bending and curling, pulsing against his prostate in tender waves that threaten to fill Bucky with need like a cup spilling over.

“I—Steve,” Bucky gasps out. “I’m gonna—oh, no, _no,_ not yet—”

The pressure on his prostate backs off quickly. Steve doesn’t pull his fingers out, but he does exactly what Bucky asks, bringing him back from the edge and following his wish that his orgasm be held off until Steve is snug inside him.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Steve laughs breathily. “You just make me crazy. I want to make you feel good all the time.”

He kisses Bucky again and again while his rim loosens around those fingers. It feels like an hour of sweet lips and tongue until the tip of Steve’s smallest digit is stroking against him from the outside.

“Taking what I give you so well,” Steve murmurs. “Are you ready for one more?”

Bucky draws in a deep, slow breath, closing his eyes as his head tilts back into the pillow. He holds it in his lungs until he can feel the lightness of too little oxygen seep throughout his muddled brain.

“Yes, ‘m ready. Want you to.”

Steve smiles against his collarbone, where he’s been working on a new bruise. Bucky thinks he’s going to push in the fourth finger, but then suddenly Steve’s arm is around his waist, and he’s not on his back anymore but facing downward, Steve’s face under his neck while Bucky rests atop him. The fingers inside him never leave.

“There we go,” Steve coos, readjusting them so Bucky can securely straddle Steve’s waist while holding himself up on his forearms. “Want my baby to be comfortable for this part. Might take a little while."

The inside of Steve’s arm brushes the bottom of Bucky’s cock where he’s reaching beneath his balls to get inside his hole. Steve withdraws the three fingers inside him and draws them tighter together, and Bucky gasps, taking in the sensation of the fourth finger being crowded in alongside the rest.

“Oh,” he breathes when the pressure on his rim increases. “Oh, I—”

—And then there are four fingers inside him all the way to the first knuckle, and Bucky has never felt so pressed open before.

“Easy,” Steve says into his ear. “Don’t clench down too much. Relax.”

Bucky breathes in and out with slow waves of air filling and emptying his lungs, trying to do as Steve says. He closes his eyes and focuses on relaxing the squeeze of his inner walls over the length of what Steve has worked into him. His fingers are almost all the way to the second knuckle, and Steve’s arm is still wrapped around his waist to secure Bucky and keep him exactly where he is.

“Doing so good, sweetheart.” Steve draws Bucky’s attention back to their mouths as he leans his head up, slipping his tongue inside. “So good,” he rasps. “Know just how to take this for me.”

“Steve,” Bucky whispers against his lips, trying to push his hips downward, but the arm around him won’t permit it. _“Steve,_ more…”

Steve presses his fingers deeper until they’re all the way inside. The ring of muscle around them burns, but it isn’t pain—not really. The stretch feels dull and sweet, like Bucky has done something right. He’s relaxed enough to take them without hurting.

“Perfect,” Steve growls against his lips. “Look at you, sweet boy. This little hole took all four.” He kisses the underside of Bucky’s jaw. “So proud of you.”

The fingers curl just enough to tease and make Bucky moan with pressure on his sweet spot like he’s never known before. Steve begins to withdraw them slowly, inching them out and stroking him inside as he goes.

“Feels so _good_ ,” he gasps.

“Mm. I know, baby.” Steve’s cock is hard and leaking where it stands straight up behind Bucky, slotting between his cheeks. “Gonna feel even better when I get in you.”

Steve keeps up like that for some time, toying with him. He slips his fingers in and out with slow precision, pushing and pulling like he’s trying to massage him more than just finger him open. Bucky thinks that maybe he is.

“Steve,” Bucky whines. It’s been minutes and minutes of his dick leaking against both of their stomachs, and his lips feel chapped and sugar-coated from Steve and his dutiful kissing. “I’m ready now.”

Bucky feels the rumbling sound Steve buries in his skin all the way down to his bones. Steve thrusts his fingers in several more times, quicker now, like he’s doing it just for good measure, before removing them completely. Bucky’s heart leaps up to his throat with fast-rising anticipation.

“Just a little longer, baby,” Steve murmurs against Bucky’s wet mouth. “Not done making this perfect for you.”

And then Steve’s lips are gone and Bucky is on his back again. Steve kneels between his spread legs and stares down at him sprawled out like he just wants to admire the view, running his hands over his butterflied thighs. Bucky whines at the loss of warm skin against his.

In one elegant, athletic movement, Steve shoves his hands beneath Bucky’s legs and lowers himself flat to the mattress, yanking Bucky’s entire body towards him, pulling his ass to his face.

“Oh—fuck!” Bucky moans, crying out high as Steve wastes no time before licking into him.

It’s so hot, but so brilliantly… lewd. Bucky’s hole is open and pliant right now— _loose_ , maybe—and Steve is tonguing it like it’s his mouth. It’s so lascivious that it would feel out of place with all of Steve’s drawn-out, sensual loving if it weren’t for how he’s using his lips and tongue in the most oddly tender way, as though he’s licking and kissing him anywhere but down there.

Everything is wet, slow laving, and it’s hardly more than a tease, but _fuck_ does it feel like heaven. Bucky’s cheeks are aflame from the way Steve keeps thumbing his rim open while he kisses and licks and sucks, and it’s embarrassing, but not nearly as much as it gets him hot. He can hear himself whimpering.

“Mm,” Steve groans between Bucky’s cheeks. “Baby boy… If you feel half as good on my cock as you do on my tongue…” But he doesn’t finish his sentence, because Steve buries his face so fervently against Bucky’s hole that any words uttered would be muffled and lost. All Bucky can do is thread his fingers through Steve’s hair and hold on for the sensational ride.

Bucky is getting more than tongue, now; Steve is working in his fingers alongside. He’s pushing and withdrawing with two or three and even four, curling them upwards for Bucky’s pleasure, licking around the taut ring of muscle as it learns to stretch open wide.

He’s not sure how long Steve eats him out for, but it feels like hours. All Bucky knows is he can hear himself whimpering for more again, and he knows Steve can, too. He feels like he can’t take another second of waiting after so long—days, weeks—and he's stretched and ready and he needs to have Steve inside him.

Bucky needs it _now_.

“Steve…” His voice is cracked open and seeping out desperation. _“Please._ I’m ready. I want you.”

Steve’s ministrations have gradually ramped up in intensity, but now they slow to careful, affectionate kissing and loving strokes with his fingers. He pulls out, sitting up. The way he wipes his dripping beard on his forearm might be the most filthy, erotic sight Bucky has ever seen.

“I know, baby,” Steve husks, running his hands up and down the insides of Bucky’s thighs. “You’re ready for me to have you now.”

Steve lays his body over Bucky’s, bringing their lips together in a soft kiss. If Bucky had ever been bothered by Steve’s mouth on his after he’s been rimming him—which he never has been—he certainly doesn’t care now. This kiss is gentle and sweet, but it’s _deep_ , deep enough for Bucky to taste devotion and promise.

“How do you want to be? We can stay just like this,” and Steve nudges his thick cock into the joining between Bucky’s hip and thigh, a demonstration of a gentle thrust, “or you can be on top of me. Or you can be on your elbows and knees.”

Bucky’s mind runs through a series of images in his head as he thinks about what it would feel like in each position. They’re all hot as fuck, and they all have their appeal, but Steve’s dick is thick and heavy against his hip and Bucky is starting to get a little bit scared for the first time.

It's not nearly enough to make him want to stop.

“Want you to choose,” he answers, biting his own lip like it’s not already red and slick enough. “But I… I want to see your face.”

Steve smiles down at him, adoring, and nods his head. He leans in for another sweet kiss.

“We’ll stay just like this, then,” he murmurs against his mouth. “What do you need to say if it doesn’t feel good? If we need to put the brakes on?”

“Just ‘stop,’” Bucky recites, and it earns him a fond grin.

“Perfect. And then what happens?”

“And then you stop.”

Steve gives him a peck on his forehead before kneeling back again. He grabs the lube, pouring an impressive amount in his hand and slicking his cock up with it. He rubs the excess over Bucky’s softened hole.

“Still okay?” he asks when he spots Bucky staring at Steve’s dick with a slack, intimidated expression on his face. “We can wait. I know it’s a lot—”

“—No,” Bucky interrupts, breathless but certain. “I want this. I’m ready.”

Steve smiles gently. He nods, wiping his lube-wet hand clean against the sheets.

“It’s going to be uncomfortable at first.” He settles himself back over Bucky, holding most of his weight on his elbows and pressing their cocks together. “But then—”

“But then it will feel good,” Bucky finishes. “‘Cause it’s you.”

Something in Steve’s face comes apart and falls over Bucky in pieces. He cups the side of Bucky’s head, taking his mouth in a deep, intense embrace that feels the way music sounds.

His hand is so enormous holding Bucky’s cheek. It’s safe.

“That’s right, I’m going to make it good for you,” Steve breathes against his lips. “I swear it, Buck. You deserve to have this done right.”

Bucky whines. He pushes his hips up impatiently.

 _“Please,”_ he begs. “Please… Need you to be in me.”

Steve nods, rocking his forehead against Bucky’s, and he spreads his own legs wider to provide himself support from his knees. He stuffs one pillow under Bucky’s hips and sets another one aside before placing a gentle hold to the back of one of Bucky’s thighs, pushing it into his chest. The position makes Bucky open up even more.

“You know I want to watch,” Steve drawls with a sexy, playful smile. “I want to see how I disappear inside you. Wanna see how you take me.”

He leans down again until their chests and noses are touching, lips just a breath away. His weight is comfortably distributed; Bucky’s body doesn’t take much of it at all, but what he does bear is a comforting, grounding pressure pinning him to the mattress. Steve’s presence swallows him and surrounds him.

“I _want_ to watch,” Steve repeats, a whisper against Bucky’s lips. “And I will. But not tonight. Tonight, I’m going to hold you and kiss you until you’ve got all of me inside you. And I’m not going to move in you until I know you’re ready.”

Bucky closes his eyes and nods, basking in the soothing tone. Steve shifts and does something with his hand, and then there’s the wide, blunt head of Steve’s cock against the slicked-up entrance to his body and—and _fuck_ , it feels so big. There’s no way they’re going to be able to fit that in him.

He can’t help it; he starts shaking.

“Hey, hey,” Steve soothes, hand on Bucky’s cheek, cock still only pressing against the outside. “It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re ready for this.”

Bucky’s breathing sounds jagged to his own ears, but at least he’s breathing. He wants this. He wants this so bad, and he knows Steve is right: his body is well-prepared to take this. He does his best to push away the nerves and the shakes.

“Yeah,” Bucky swallows. “I… I know.” He leans up an inch to peck Steve’s lips. “I’m ready. I want you to do it now.”

Steve nods back. Their noses brush together.

“Hands on my shoulders, sweetheart.” Steve presses his fingers against Bucky’s ass on the skin around the head of his dick like he’s testing the give of his muscle one final time. “Hands on me. Lips on mine.”

Steve eases Bucky’s pushed back thigh outward, opening him up further for the girth of his cockhead as it tries to struggle past the rim. It’s the first push. The burn and sear of it make Bucky suck in a strangled breath that tastes entirely of Steve.

At least that last part is bliss.

“‘S’okay, ‘s’okay, baby boy. Open your eyes.”

And Bucky hadn’t even realized his eyes were closed so tightly. He sees Steve’s face come into view through his lashes as he slowly opens his lids, and he almost stops breathing right then and there.

For all that the sensation of being stretched open is electrifying every nerve in his body, it’s the infinite blue in his lover’s eyes that lights Bucky up.

For all that Steve Rogers is a broken man who’s known pain and loss and violence, it’s the yearning to fill Bucky with himself that finally puts tears in his eyes.

“Sweetheart,” Steve croaks. “Sweetheart, let me in. I’ll take care of you. I’ll make love to you.” He presses their foreheads together, breathing heavily as the precisely balanced pressure of his cock at Bucky’s entrance does nothing but ask and patiently wait. “Please, beautiful… Please let me in.”

And then Steve’s wet lips fit themselves perfectly over his, and Bucky knows it’s time to breathe out.

Steve’s girth slips inside him several inches in one shockingly easy push before Steve can catch it and stop the slide. It doesn’t hurt. It burns—sure—and it’s definitely uncomfortable, but Bucky’s too suddenly open and blissful and perfect for any feeling Steve gives him to be anything but welcome.

 _“Jesus,_ baby,” Steve gasps, shocked, a hint of laughter heard in undertones. “Bucky, sweetheart…” His lips sink lovingly over Bucky’s, slotting between. “Fuck. You’re made to take me, aren’t you?”

But Steve doesn’t push in further; not yet. He peppers Bucky’s face in kisses, pausing to let the aching burn slowly subside. Bucky embraces the opportunity to tilt his head back and squeeze his eyes shut, breathing, absorbing the feelings shooting around inside him.

“‘S’okay?” Steve murmurs into the side of his face. His cock shifts, but not enough to go deeper. “Hurts?”

Bucky shakes his head and opens his eyes, asking for a kiss that he instantly receives.

“No. Feels…” Bucky exhales on Steve’s mouth. “Big.”

He expects Steve to chuckle, but he doesn’t. He nods softly instead.

“Think you’re ready for a little more?”

Bucky adjusts his hips. He can’t move much with Steve securely holding his leg back, but he can shift enough to figure out how much more it would burn if Steve were to go deeper. He wants it.

“Yes,” he whispers. “Please.”

Steve’s movements are glacial and precisely controlled as he sinks in an inch or two further, stopping when he hears Bucky gasp.

“Alright?” Steve checks in.

Bucky exhales, nodding. “Just… deep.”

Steve hums sympathetically and distracts him with another kiss. Bucky thinks he’s maybe halfway in by now, but he can’t be sure. All he knows is that the pressure at this depth is already more than he can remember feeling with any of the toys—although, objectively, some of those toys he took even deeper. At least this new kind of discomfort shifts his focus from the burning stretch around his rim. If he closes his eyes while Steve kisses him, Bucky thinks he can even feel a nascent pressure against his prostate from just the girth pushing him open.

“Ready,” he breathes, and Steve heeds his green light without delay.

“You’re so good.” Steve presses kisses to the underside of Bucky’s chin as he pushes in another small increment. “So good. Tighter an’ sweeter than anything I’ve ever felt.”

The praise does wonders for Bucky’s diminished arousal, sparking a brand new current to life. He involuntarily clenches down on Steve’s length.

 _“Christ,”_ Steve groans, visibly steadying himself.

Bucky hooks his unrestrained leg around Steve’s calf, encouraging him to sink in another inch, and that’s when he notices that Steve is sweating. He’s never seen Steve’s skin break out in moisture from anything other than heat, which makes sense to Bucky—everyday exertions aren’t much to a super soldier—so he wonders what’s different now.

It’s then that he feels Steve trembling all over, almost imperceptibly. He’s trying to control himself.

“You can go more,” Bucky assures. He knows they’re both adjusted and ready. “Almost there?”

Steve moans as he presses in further, but it’s minuscule compared to his previous pushes.

“Yeah, sweetheart… Almost. You’re taking me so good.”

Despite the growing feeling of being split open, Bucky cants his hips up to encourage more, and Steve gives it to him. He stops when he sees Bucky wincing.

“Can you…” Bucky starts, trying to gather his words. His skin is flushed all over, and he’s sweating as well. “Can you try, um.”

Steve doesn’t make him finish the sentence, because he understands what Bucky is trying to ask. Of course he does. He attaches their lips together before he starts pulling out slowly, maybe to the halfway point, and then he’s sinking in again to the same spot he’d just left.

 _“Oh…”_ Bucky moans. The sound buzzes between their mouths as he revels in the sudden heavenly friction chipping away at the tight burning. “I—Daddy…”

The name just slips off his tongue, which Bucky has come to expect from himself. He doesn’t expect it when Steve pulls out again and pushes back in the deepest he’s reached yet. He also doesn’t expect Steve’s guttural growl smothered in the hollow of Bucky’s neck.

“Oh, baby _boy,”_ Steve groans, huffing out a half-laugh. “You sweet thing. You’d better be careful with that if you don’t want to get yourself wrecked.”

And, just like that, every nerve in Bucky’s spine is alight with fiery, sparking energy. He starts writhing as much as Steve’s careful weight pinning him to the bed will allow, trying to get more, trying to do to himself exactly what Steve has just cautiously warned him against because ‘wrecked’ sounds fucking _fantastic_.

“Not yet, sweetheart. You can squirm as much as you can want in a minute. Let’s get this cock inside you first.”

Bucky makes a noise that’s only partly a whine; his heart isn’t in it. He wants to grind and shake, except what he wants even more is the same as what Steve wants—to fill him up to the brim—but he quietly worries that they’re going to run out of room for Steve’s cock to push him open.

Steve goes slow as he works himself in and out in short, measured movements. He’s not fucking him, not even thrusting yet. Steve is just sort of… rocking. He’s working his cock into Bucky one centimeter at a time so Bucky can handle it and still get something pleasurable along the way.

Bucky is starting to feel dizzy, whether from the onslaught of mixed ache and arousal, or from lack of oxygen as Steve kisses the life out of him, or perhaps it’s from both. Steve slides an arm beneath his upper back while the other continues to hold his thigh. The stretch in his hamstrings is completely worth it for the intimacy and closeness their position brings.

“Breathe in for me, baby, hold it,” and Bucky does as he’s told. “Good. Now, let it go…”

His exhale feels like the most important breath Bucky has ever let out in his life, and maybe it is. Steve times it with a deep movement of his hips, wedging more of his length inside.

“Oh my God,” Bucky whimpers, squeezing his eyes shut.

The pain is real now. It feels like Steve’s cock is in his throat. Bucky is about to throw in the towel and admit that he can’t take anymore when he notices Steve raining down enthusiastic kisses all over him. His eyes might be wet.

“Sweetheart,” Steve rasps. “Baby, you _did_ it.”

And now Bucky notices it: the warmth of Steve’s hips against the back of his thighs.

“I—I…” Bucky can hear his own voice trembling, and he opens his eyes. He can’t believe what he’s feeling. “All of it?”

Steve hums. There’s the slickness of teeth against Bucky’s skin where Steve is pressing a grin into his neck. He grinds his cock in a slow, gentle circle, letting Bucky feel the heavy weight of his balls resting against his ass.

“Oh my _God_ ,” Bucky laughs, sounding almost hysterical with joy. “Oh my God. That’s all of it, we—you’re—”

Steve kisses him slow on the lips.

“Yeah, Buck. I’m in you. You took all of me.”

Bucky smiles and shuts his eyes again, pressing his head back into the pillow and focusing every brain cell he has on Steve filling him up. He’s sore all over, and he’s full to bursting, but he’s somehow still in one piece in Steve’s arms and he’s good enough to take everything Steve gave him.

“How are you feeling?” Steve asks, brushing sweaty hair from Bucky’s forehead. “Pain?”

Bucky opens his eyes. He finds Steve gazing down with wonder and concern beneath his unabated lust.

“Yeah,” he admits, but he goes on before Steve can think about withdrawing. “But it’s better, it’s—it’s getting better.”

And it is. What was once a sharp, searing sensation is already fading into a throbbing ache. Bucky clenches down experimentally.

“Fuck,” Steve growls into his mouth, grinding his hips again and, oh, that feels nice.

They spend a while with nothing but Steve’s slow, careful circles and tender kissing. Steve murmurs praise into his ears and his mouth the whole time, whispers of, _“You’re perfect,”_ and, _“Did so good, sweetheart, so good for me.”_ Sometimes, he’ll pull out an inch and slide delicately back in, and Bucky finds himself squeezing down every time as though he’s afraid of being left empty.

Maybe he is, now that he finally knows what it’s like to be full.

 _“Jesus,_ baby,” Steve swears on one particularly hard squeeze. “Gonna be the death of me if you keep doing that. You ready for me to try moving some more?”

Bucky nods. He feels breathless already, but he still wants Steve to push the air from his lungs.

“Yes. ‘M ready.”

Steve tightens his hold on Bucky’s thigh, hitching his leg back again after he’d allowed it to fall loose and slack while Bucky adjusted.

“Tell me if something doesn’t feel good,” Steve says, and then presses his love against Bucky’s lips.

It’s a weird feeling at first: Steve sliding in and out of him. Bucky is surprised to find that the pain doesn’t start up again, but he guesses that makes sense, because Steve isn’t really fucking him yet. He’s just slipping through him in slow strokes and never really pulling out, testing the waters, watching Bucky’s face with rapt attention to gauge his reactions to each movement.

But it’s not long before the funny sensations start to become something else. Bucky is reminded of the first time Steve had given him the beaded toy, how good it felt when each part slipped in and out through his rim, except instead of rounded notches, it’s the warm, smooth flesh of Steve’s cock as it slides through with his fattened-up width and glorious, veiny texture.

 _“Oh!”_ Bucky gasps the first time Steve pulls out enough for his cockhead to whisper past that sensitive bundle of nerves inside him.

Steve grins like he’s just spotted dinner. He pushes in and does it again.

“Feeling good now?” he teases—and Bucky can’t even moan out a ‘yes’ before Steve is stopping completely.

“Wha’…”

Bucky lies back, ass filled up and eyebrows pinched together in confusion while Steve rearranges the pillows. He moves the one he’d set aside until it’s also beneath Bucky’s hips, two stacked high. He never once pulls out.

“Told you I was going to make it good for you,” Steve gives Bucky’s half-hard dick a stroke before settling back in, taking Bucky’s leg under the knee again. “Time for me to make good on my promise.”

And oh—fuck, does Steve make good on it.

“Oh my god—!” Bucky gasps, his breath shuddering through him. “What is… how— _oh!”_

The new angle doesn’t even have Steve hitting Bucky’s prostate; Steve is just… pressing against it, no matter where or how he moves.

“There we go,” Steve grins. “Feeling that sweet place inside you?”

‘Feeling’ it isn’t the right word; Bucky is blinded by it, eyes rolling to the back of his head, neck arched and bared. Steve is so thick that he doesn’t even have to aim for that swollen, sensitive gland to make Bucky’s cock weep out clear fluid, and fuck, is it—? It’s drooling already somehow, even when Bucky isn’t fully hard again yet and Steve isn’t really fucking him, still gliding in and out. His girth is just so much that it presses upward, perfect. Bucky feels like a low, thrumming orgasm is being slowly massaged out of him, but he knows he’s not actually coming yet.

“Feels so g-good,” he whimpers brokenly. He opens his eyes and finds Steve’s looking down at him already, expression dark and rapt. “I— _Steve—”_

But he can’t finish his sentence, because Steve has captured his mouth in an earth-shattering kiss that he won’t ever be able to forget.

He’s floating somewhere high up near the ceiling. The ache in his muscles has dulled and blended with the pleasure singing through him, coalescing into one swollen bubble of joy and carnal magic. Bucky could burst. He’s headed up a ramp, and he’s got to jump off when he gets to the top or he’ll surely die in a sprawl on Steve’s sheets.

It feels so right.

“Oh, baby boy,” Steve breathes, propping himself up to look down the gap between their bodies at the forming pool on Bucky’s belly. “You’re ready to come for me, aren’t you?”

And how can Steve be so right about that when he’s still hardly thrusting his hips? How can Steve do so little and still have Bucky ready to fall to pieces?

“Steve,” he begs. “It feels—I… _Please...”_

Steve answers the whispered prayer. He leverages Bucky’s leg until it’s resting over his shoulder, and he wastes no time before wrapping his freed hand around Bucky’s hard, leaking dick.

Bucky shouts out a name when the length inside him withdraws completely and pushes back in, pressing his nerves into lit gunpowder and bright blue oblivion. Steve kisses the sound off his lips. He gets what was promised to him as he lies in Steve’s bed, shaking apart, caged against the sheets while he becomes something brand new around Steve’s pulsing cock.

 _“Fuck,”_ Steve chokes out, gasping down in awe, eyes darting between Bucky’s face and his long, slow release on his stomach. He hasn’t stopped moving inside him, although his hand has mostly stilled. “Sweetheart...”

It’s the most drawn-out orgasm Bucky’s ever had, trapping his bottom lip between the sting of his own teeth. The pressure against his prostate renews every time his walls shudder and clench down, sending a new surge of endorphins through his blood, making Bucky moan and scream and tremble beneath Steve's massive body.

“Oh my God,” Bucky moans as the edge crests but keeps going, the thick length inside him going nowhere and changing nothing even as the euphoric pulse wanes. “Oh my _God.”_

“Shh, shh,” Steve shushes. He kisses Bucky’s cheek and does something with his arms down below. “I got you. You’re okay.”

He feels Steve shift, removing one of the two pillows beneath his hips and widening his own knees, and the change in angle lets up on the pressure against his sweet spot. Bucky is panting, reeling, staring up at Steve’s attentive face while he waits for the rest of his body to return to the earth.

“Fuck,” Bucky laughs, splaying his arms out on either side of his head. He feels the stupid smile on his face. “That was…”

Steve smirks and leans in for a kiss. He’s still snug inside him, even if he’s not pressing on that spot anymore.

“That was what a really good prostate orgasm feels like. I probably didn’t even need to touch you.”

The implication behind those words almost blows Bucky’s mind all over again.

“I can _do_ that?”

Steve shrugs, pressing his grin into the side of Bucky’s face while he gently grinds his still-hard cock in deep.

“I don’t know,” he teases. “Some people can. I think we should find out sometime.”

Bucky could swear that Steve is about to start moving again—maybe trying to do what he’s talking about, even though Bucky has mostly gone soft—but he doesn’t. He supports himself on his hands instead and carefully begins pulling out. Bucky gasps, stopping him with hands on his shoulders.

“Don’t,” he says. “Keep going, I… I want you to come in me.”

Steve grins down at him.

“Don’t you worry. I will. I promise.” His cock pushes in a few inches when he leans to give Bucky a kiss. He runs a hand down to the place they’re so intimately joined together, tracing his finger around Bucky’s rim. “But I want to check how you’re doing first.” He lightly taps the stretched muscle once. “Down here.”

Steve takes one more kiss for himself before pulling out, and Bucky spends the long, wet slide trying to figure out what Steve means by that. His face heats up with scarlet flame once he’s empty and Steve’s intention becomes apparent.

“Steve, are you— _Jesus…”_

Steve chuckles from his new position on his stomach between Bucky’s legs, where he’s thumbing around at his hole.

“Sorry, sweetheart. Just give me a minute to make sure you can take more.”

Bucky sighs and lets his head flop back onto the pillow; he knows there’s no use fighting this. Steve does this every time they try something new and bigger, so there’s no reason to expect he would do any different when ‘new and bigger’ is his cock.

“You’re a little swollen,” Steve murmurs, kissing the skin of Bucky’s perineum affectionately. “A bit puffy. But I expected that. No bleeding.” He rubs two fingers in a light circle over the loose muscle. “How does this feel?”

“Like you’re examining me,” Bucky huffs. “But, um… Everything still feels good. I want you back inside me.”

Steve’s chest lets loose a rumbling sound as he places a wet, open-mouthed kiss over Bucky’s hole. He rises up on his knees.

“So fuckin’ perfect,” Steve swears, slicking up his cock with more lube before lowering himself down. He kisses Bucky’s lips. “Is this position still okay?”

“Yes,” Bucky whines impatiently. “C’mon, yes, I love it, just please— _oh!”_

Steve doesn’t tease him any longer. He pushes in slowly in one smooth, long stroke, bottoming out with practiced control.

“You’re so tight on me, Buck.” Steve presses his lips along Bucky's jawline. _“So_ tight. So sweet.”

Bucky’s not hard again, not yet, but his dick still jumps when Steve starts to move. He’s glad that the second pillow isn’t under him right now and that his feet are both flat on the sheets; the slide of Steve in him feels hot and amazing, but their previous angle would be too much for him right now.

“Fuck,” Bucky breathes against Steve’s kiss-swollen lips, hooking his feet up until his heels are pressing into Steve’s muscled ass. “I want to do this forever.”

Steve stops suddenly, just when he’d begun to speed up. He’s gazing down at Bucky with an indiscernible expression on his face: some mixture of love and inexplicable sadness.

“Sweetheart.” Steve brushes a tendril of hair from Bucky’s forehead. “You have no idea how much I want that.”

The energy emanating from Steve changes from what it had been before. It’s still tender, still intense, but now it becomes something else as he captures Bucky’s mouth in a deep kiss. His hips start moving again, slowly and with devotion. With purpose.

Bucky’s chest is warm and full. The rest of him is floating far above his body.

“Daddy…”

There was a time when Bucky couldn’t have been convinced that calling Steve _'Daddy'_ and being called sultry, honied names in return could feel romantic, but it does. It feels special—it feels _them_ —when Steve whispers _'sweetheart'_ and _'baby boy'_ as he takes Bucky apart. It turns him into more than just Steve’s lover, but Steve’s treasure. It makes him feel like he’s made of stardust and rain and other priceless, precious things that Steve can’t bear to tear his eyes from.

“That’s right,” Steve husks. “Tell me, sweet boy. Tell me who’s inside you.” He brushes their lips together, speeding up the thrusting of his hips without actually moving fast yet, and he whispers more, “Tell me again who loves you.”

 _“Daddy,”_ Bucky repeats, gasping out his answer as Steve moves like ocean waves within him. He’s getting hard again. “Faster, Daddy. Please go faster.”

It’s almost strange—seeing real tears in Steve’s blue eyes as his face illuminates with happiness brighter than sunshine. He answers Bucky’s wishes and increases his gentle tempo, changing the angle every so often so his cockhead presses up against Bucky’s sweet spot.

Steve pauses his thrusting after a moment. He kneels up, gazing down at him like he sees nothing but an expanse of pure splendor. His eyes slide from Bucky’s parted lips and follow the color of flush down his chest, moving over his abdomen and his hard, wet erection, before finally ending at the place where he’s stretching Bucky open. His fingers are splayed out over Bucky’s hips as he subtly rocks inside him.

“Jesus, baby. Wish you could see this.” Steve traces a finger around Bucky’s stretched-open hole and the thickness of his own cock inside it. “Ready for Daddy to make you feel good again?”

Bucky doesn’t have a chance to respond in words; his newly hard dick twitches against his stomach, which is apparently answer enough for Steve. He starts moving, sitting back towards his heels as he lifts Bucky’s hips upward, pushing in and pulling out at a steadily increasing pace. The movement and new pressure on his prostate are a tortuous, blissful rapture unfolding beneath his skin.

“Fuck,” Bucky laughs, reaching back over his head to grab the headboard. He can feel the wide, beaming smile on his face. “This is…”

“Yeah?” Steve pulls out completely before sinking his cock back in, not fast, but the fastest he’s gone yet. There’s a beautiful grin on his face. “Tell Daddy how it feels, baby boy.”

Bucky tries to piece together words, but he finds no room for thought next to the sensations lighting his nerves up and the way his cheeks hurt from the size of his smile.

“I—oh, _Daddy!_ —It’s, God…” He makes a giggly sound that rings throughout the room. “It’s so fucking… so fucking _f-fun.”_

Deep, joyous laughter erupts from Steve's chest, and the sound comes out like music. The smile on his face as he blithely tosses his head back is wider than any Bucky has ever seen on him. He’s got Steve in him, finally, and Steve is moving, actually fucking him and making love to him like a sweet Daddy should, and there is nothing but bliss in Bucky’s veins.

He is so, so happy.

Steve thrusts quicker and hoists Bucky’s hips up like they weigh as much as a piece of paper, and oh, fuck, _fuck—_

“Fuck!”

Steve grins like a wolf again. He knows he’s hitting Bucky’s prostate head on—lift only, no pillow required—and the angle is too damn precise and perfect. Bucky hears himself shouting from the upper ridges of his lungs. His belly feels tight, but not like he’s going to come. It feels like he’s being stretched so wide that Steve can see the core of him bared open. It feels like Steve owns him. It feels… It feels like—

 _“Goddamn,_ baby boy,” Steve swears, staring down near Bucky’s navel. He hurriedly takes one of Bucky’s hands in his own. “C’mere, let me show you how fucking _little_ you are.”

Bucky has no idea what Steve means—his head is so crazy, his brain is like fuzz—but then Steve halts inside him and takes his hand and presses it against Bucky’s lower belly and he shows him, he _shows_ Bucky what he wants him to feel.

“Oh my—Oh my God!”

He understands the tightness now, Bucky gets why it feels like he’s going to come apart at any minute. Steve’s cock is there inside him, and no one can deny it because the outline of it is right there— _right_ there—pushing against the flesh and skin of his stomach from the inside, out.

“Feel that?” Steve presses their hands down harder as he starts moving again. “Do you feel where Daddy has you?”

Bucky nods desperately, shaking loose the tears of sensation forming at the corners of his eyes. He loses himself in the movement beneath his palm for a dozen more thrusts before reaching for his own cock, but Steve stops him with commanding fingers circling his wrist, pinning it back his belly.

“You can come like this,” Steve growls. “I know you can. I can see it. You can touch Daddy’s cock in you, but you’ll leave yourself alone.”

Bucky’s head is spinning. He doesn’t get to touch his dick to make himself shoot off—Steve says ‘no,’ Steve says Bucky doesn’t need to, Steve says that Bucky can come from just the cock in him and the love of Daddy’s gaze and the perfect pressure on his sweet spot—but he can feel the new, tiny puddle of warmth pooling on his abdomen from his fucked-through dick. Maybe Steve is right.

“Daddy…” he whimpers, squeezing the bulge in his stomach as it moves back and forth. “Daddy, I need…”

Bucky doesn’t finish his sentence; Daddy already knows he needs to come. He wants Steve to keep going, and he wants Steve to come with him this time, but—more than either of those things—Bucky wants Steve to decide what will happen.

“I know what you need, sweet boy.” Steve begins to pick up the pace, angle just right. He’s sweating. “Be good and let Daddy give it to you.”

This orgasm is unlike any Bucky’s had before. His whole body tightens, clamping down on Steve’s cock inside him, and his balls draw up so far that it almost hurts. White stripes cover his stomach and chest, and when Steve grips his hips harder halfway through and lifts them up even more, a bit of it splashes onto Bucky’s chin. His cock is untouched.

“Goddamn,” Steve groans. “ _Goddamn_ , baby. There you go— _fuck_ yeah—milk your Daddy’s big, fat cock.”

And then Bucky’s back is off the mattress because Steve is lifting him, arms around his body while his cock stays inside him. He sits up and kneels back, letting Bucky’s legs wrap around his waist, and Bucky expects to feel gravity impale him fully over Steve’s length but it doesn’t. Steve moves him up and down on his cock with all the strength of a god and all the intensity of a fuck-drunk man in love.

“So perfect,” he growls, turning his head to nip the soft skin inside Bucky’s forearm where his arms are wrapped around Steve’s neck. “So gorgeous when you’re coming on my cock.” He leans in to whisper into Bucky’s ear. _“Daddy’s gonna fill you up now.”_

Bucky cries out a high-pitched, broken moan because he doesn’t know how else to let these starlight feelings out. Steve is throbbing inside him and bouncing his body up and down like he’s a toy, and he’s also not sure if he’s stopped coming yet.

“Please,” he begs brokenly. “Come in me, Daddy. Fill me up. Wanna be yours.”

The possessive sound that leaves Steve’s chest is more animal than human. He stops bouncing Bucky so he can grind up into him instead, ghosting fingers over the wet stretch of his rim, biting Bucky’s lips, and oh—oh.

_“Oh!”_

Steve rumbles out deep, groaning noises and presses their foreheads together hard.

“Then take it, baby boy,” he grits, slamming hips up into his ass as hard as Bucky imagines Steve would dare on this first time. “ _Take_ your Daddy’s come.”

Bucky feels every long second and wet ounce of heat when Steve empties himself inside him. It’s a strange but magnificent sensation, and he doesn’t even hear the eager, desperate noises coming from his own throat until Steve is pinning him back to the bed and tilting his hips upwards, thrusting, fucking his own creamy come out of Bucky’s hole when the amount turns too copious for his body to take.

“Daddy!” Bucky whines in his ecstasy, blissed-out and fuzzy-brained beyond anything he’s ever experienced before. “Yes, yes… _Daddy…”_

Steve slows eventually—still coming and grinding—and leans forward to capture Bucky’s mouth with his own.

“Thank you,” he rasps against Bucky's lips, Steve's heat and breath touching everything Bucky is made from. “You are… Thank you.”

Bucky feels like his mind has left him and he’s nothing more than a body and a heart. He hardly registers it when Steve wraps him up and rolls them over, taking Bucky’s dead weight on top of him.

“That was…” But Bucky doesn’t finish whatever he was going to say, because it would probably sound dumb, and because he doesn’t need words when he has Steve’s big, furry super soldier tits to nuzzle his face into.

“Mm,” Steve’s chest rumbles, agreement hummed into Bucky’s ear. “Good?”

Bucky giggles against Steve’s nipple. He sounds drunk.

“Mmm… The best.”

Steve chuckles fondly. He pets Bucky’s damp hair while they both work on coming down. The bed smells like come and sweat, and Bucky kind of wants to ask Steve if he can stick his face in his armpit.

“The best, huh?” Steve pants. “And what was your favorite part?”

Bucky thinks really, really carefully about the question. He clenches down and sighs dreamily when the movement makes Steve gasp.

“The part where your cock is still in my ass.”

Steve’s deep laughter buzzes against Bucky’s cheek. The feeling tickles, so he laughs, too.

—

The serene sounds of gently splashing water only make Bucky want to keep his eyes closed for longer. He relaxes further into his recline against Steve’s hard chest, inhaling the earthy-sweet herbal scents billowing through the bathroom. He makes a mental note to ask later where a hardened farmer like Steve Rogers acquires lavender bath soak.

_“Is my sweetheart awake?”_

The question is barely more than a whisper in his ear. Steve is cupping handfuls of perfectly warm bath water and letting it cascade over Bucky’s chest and arms. It feels amazing.

“Mm,” Bucky hums, eyes closed and body loose. “Nope.”

Steve laughs.

“Oh, alright. Just checking. Because if you _were_ awake…” He brushes his fingers along the sensitive inside of his thigh beneath the water. “Then I was going to ask you how you’re feeling. And see what you wanted for a late dinner.” He wraps both arms around Bucky’s waist and pulls him in even closer, lowering his voice. “And then I was going to remind you that I love you.”

Bucky can’t help it; his face stretches wide in a grin, even with his eyes closed.

“Well… if I were awake—which I’m not—I would probably tell you that I feel kinda sore but, um. Really good.” He suppresses a chuckle when Steve gives him a comfortably tight squeeze and starts tracing slow, gentle kisses down the side of his neck. “And then I would tell you that I want a ham and cheese omelet, and I want you to make it for me.” He tips his head back, letting Steve’s mouth travel down to his clavicle. “And then I would ask you to turn me around so you can kiss me and tell me that last part again.”

Steve hums richly against his skin, and then Bucky’s being maneuvered in the circle of Steve’s arms before either of them has time to take another full breath. Steve’s big cock feels soft but hot beneath him as he settles down in Steve’s lap, looping arms around his neck with well-practiced ease.

“I love you,” Steve whispers against his lips, suddenly full of that familiar intensity again. “I love you. I love you.”

Bucky lets Steve kiss the breath straight out of his lungs.

Afterwards, he lets Steve towel him off and take him down to the kitchen in nothing but a pair of clean boxers and a too-big shirt, and he lets Steve make him an omelet—which turns out to be surprisingly well-seasoned.

He lets Steve carry him back upstairs after claiming he’s too sleepy to walk there himself.

He lets Steve lay him down in his bed and cover them both with a big, heavy quilt to keep away the chill of the snowy night.

“Thank you,” Steve murmurs into the hair on the back of his head, holding him close from behind. “Thank you for letting me have that.”

And then Bucky is asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

**s t e v e**

n o v e m b e r 2 4, 2 0 2 5

| 204 days until harvest |

Steve has lived just two trips around the sun on his little slice of land, but even in that time, he’s come to realize that late autumn is a unique time of year on a farm.

Daylight savings time is behind them. The days grow shorter as the air grows colder, but the dark and the cold don’t feel as bleak to Steve as they once did. His and Bucky’s chores shift from the tasks of preparing for planting to getting ready for the winter and the spring, fixing odds and ends, placing orders for new equipment they’ll need later on in the growing season.

The leaves have fallen and become blanketed by white snow. The sun doesn’t rise until nearly eight o’clock in the morning. Autumn and the approaching winter leave more time to doze. They can sleep later.

Steve has never been much for lying in—until recently.

 _“Daddy…”_ Bucky moans, reaching a hand behind himself to grasp Steve’s hair as he whispers kisses into the crook of Bucky’s neck. “Wan’ you. Need you in me.”

A deep noise of approval rumbles from the depths of Steve’s chest into the bedroom’s chilly morning air. Despite the temperatures, neither of them is actually cold; Steve runs hot enough to keep himself alive in ice for seventy years, and every line along Bucky’s backside is in heated contact with Steve’s front.

“Already?” Steve teases. “Had me in you just last night…”

Steve’s hand travels down Bucky’s ribs and waist and hips until he can dip into the crease of his plump ass and find that tight little hole he loves so much.

 _“Christ,”_ he growls, pressing one and then two fingers into Bucky’s loosened, wet heat. “Look at this, sweetheart. Still open and dripping from your Daddy fucking you.”

Bucky whimpers and pushes back onto Steve’s fingers, turning his head to blindly seek out a kiss.

It takes far less time for Steve to get him ready than it would on any other morning. Bucky’s body is already so easy and welcoming from their previous night’s lovemaking, and Steve doesn’t need to spend the half hour he usually would working four fingers inside and opening him up slowly. He can start off with two, quickly add a third, and then finally introduce a careful but confident fourth, slipping each digit through the mess he’d left behind while making Bucky writhe and whimper in his arms. Steve does all of this from his intimate position spooned behind him, dwarfing Bucky’s profile with his own, making his boy feel tiny and owned in just the way that Steve knows they both love.

“Daddy,” Bucky breathes, exhaling hot and wet against Steve’s open mouth. “I’m ready. Please.”

Steve groans and pumps his fingers in a few more times for good measure, half to ensure that Bucky is stretched and half just to feel how damn wet he is with a lewd flood of last night’s lube, this morning’s lube, and Steve’s own spend.

“Like this, baby.” Steve wipes his hand against the sheets and takes hold of Bucky’s hip, pushing his cock through Bucky’s slippery cheeks and teasing with a simulated thrust. “Gonna take you on your side like this so I can have you deep.” He slides his lips along Bucky’s jawline. “So I can see your pretty face when you take me.”

Bucky moans and nods vigorously. Steve smiles, happy that Bucky is happy with this plan. He’s just pressing the head of his dick against Bucky’s prepared hole and getting ready to push inside in the carefully executed way he always does—and then suddenly Bucky stops him.

“Wait.”

It’s nearly painful how close Steve is to getting his cock where it wants it to be, but he stops all movement on the spot. He doesn’t have to make himself do it; it’s second-nature. If his boy says ‘wait,’ then Steve will do nothing but wait.

“What is it, baby?” Steve asks, rubbing his thumb across Bucky’s chin gently. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, I—I just…” Bucky doesn’t sound distressed, but he’s laughing nervously to himself, looking away from Steve and staring downward in the direction of his own navel. There’s a shyness to be spotted on his cheeks. “I was just thinking that I wanted to, um…”

Steve can’t stop the grin growing across his face. He presses it into the back of Bucky’s neck so Bucky doesn’t see it over his shoulder and decide that Steve is teasing him.

“C’mon,” Steve murmurs, kissing the soft skin beneath his lips. “Daddy can’t give you what you want unless you tell him what it is…”

He doesn’t push further than that. Instead, he continues to press his lips into Bucky’s neck and shoulder, his upper spine, his ears. Steve keeps his mouth busy while allowing his boy a moment to gather his thoughts and his courage. He tries to imagine what Bucky’s request could be; there’s a fire in his lower belly flickering each time a new, erotic thought crosses his mind.

“I want to ride you.”

Steve has to stop himself from squeezing Bucky’s flesh too hard beneath his already iron-clad grip.

“Baby _boy…”_ Steve groans into Bucky’s shoulder, rutting his hurting cock into the slicked-up valley of Bucky’s ass so he doesn’t give in to the animal instinct to thrust forward, to bury himself in that tight, ready heat. “Fuck. _Fuck._ Give your Daddy a minute here.”

The mental image of Bucky’s request is so filthy it threatens to rupture something inside Steve. He’s afraid he’s going to die right there on their bed.

“Okay, sweetheart,” he starts with a deep breath. “We can try this—”

“Wait, why just ‘try’?” Bucky’s eyebrows pull together as he attempts to turn his head further. “I can take all of you, you _know_ I—”

“Listen to me, Bucky,” Steve interrupts sternly. Bucky blushes and closes his mouth. “Okay, good. Thank you. Come here.”

Steve maneuvers Bucky until he’s turned around in his arms, facing him. He holds him close with one hand on the small of his back.

“Sweetheart...” Steve tucks a tendril of Bucky’s hair behind his ear before resting that hand around his shoulders. He tries not to smile at Bucky’s half-interested, half-pouting expression. “We can _try_ this, but I need you to understand that it may not be as easy as you expect. It’s a difficult angle when there’s so much of me to take.”

Bucky’s head tilts further into the pillow of Steve’s bicep.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just…” Steve sighs. “It’s going to be a lot.”

“But it’s always a lot,” Bucky shrugs, giving Steve a coy smile. “And I’m getting really good at taking it.”

Steve's grin feels as big as his beating heart. Bucky’s right; he has become exceptionally good at opening up to take him. Among all of Steve’s many past lovers, he has never been with a man as small as Bucky, but he’s also never had a lover who relaxed as quickly or as easily as Bucky has learned to do over the past three weeks.

“Yeah, you are,” Steve assures softly. “You are _so_ good. You know just how to take all of me and make us both feel amazing.” He brushes a kiss against Bucky’s cheekbone. “I only meant that… when you’re the one on top—when _you’re_ in control? Daddy is going to feel like even more to take than it does when you’re laying down and letting me have you.”

Bucky blushes furiously. Steve’s hard cock kicks against his thigh.

“Oh, um. Okay…” Steve watches Bucky chew thoughtfully on his bottom lip. “But you’ll help me, right?”

Steve Rogers is so in love. It almost hurts.

“Of course, sweetheart,” he says softly. “I’m going to help you a lot. I’ll show you how much I think you should take, and then you can be the one to decide just how you want to take it.” Steve grazes the tips of his fingers over the supple curve of Bucky’s ass. “Does that sound okay?”

Bucky’s breathing is shaky and thrilled; fevered.

“Yes,” he whispers, and Steve can almost feel the anticipatory beating of Bucky’s heart. “I’m ready. You’ll help me.”

The words don’t sound like Bucky trying to reassure himself, but rather like he’s reiterating a plan—and he is. Steve _is_ going to show his boy how to do everything he wants to do, how to safely and happily navigate his desires, how to experiment with new things in a way that feels good and doesn’t get himself hurt. He’s never felt like a better Daddy than he does right in this moment.

“C’mere…”

Steve kisses him for a long time in an attempt to help calm him, but at some point, there’s little else he can do. Bucky is practically vibrating with excitement.

 _“Please,_ I’m ready,” he repeats, sitting up, trying to crawl into Steve’s lap. “Please, please…”

Bucky’s hands—so small next to Steve’s—are frantic and everywhere as Steve rearranges their bodies, sitting back against the headboard, moving Bucky until he’s sprawled across Steve’s bulky thighs. Steve has to look up at him from this angle, and he gets the most amazing view of the expression on Bucky’s face when he pushes down against Steve’s hard cock. Steve stops him from taking it inside him right away.

“Like this,” Steve rasps, tightening the arm around Bucky’s waist to hold him while he uses his other hand to position his dick at Bucky’s slicked-up entrance.

 _“Yes,”_ Bucky gasps, trying so hard to impale himself over Steve’s cock but getting nowhere with Steve’s grip and control. “Please, Daddy, please let me have it?”

“You can have it—but remember, I’m only going to let you have as much as I think you can take.” Steve presses a hot, wet kiss to the underside of Bucky’s chin. “But the way you take me is all up to you.”

His words bring a tangible shudder of excitement rolling down the length of Bucky’s spine. Steve can feel it beneath his hand. He grins into the soft, clean skin of Bucky’s gorgeous neck and fumbles around for the bottle of lube again for good measure.

“I’ll be good,” Bucky promises, and then it’s Steve’s turn to shiver.

“I know you will be. Now, c’mon.” Steve kisses his lips at the same time that he presses his wet fingers around Bucky’s stretched rim, testing its pliancy again. “Let’s get you comfortable on Daddy’s cock, and then I’ll let you have whatever kind of fun you want with it.”

Steve wraps his slick fist around his own shaft and lets up on his hold on Bucky’s waist enough to allow his weight to slide down slowly over the wide head of Steve’s cock, watching Bucky’s face as they get through the worst of the strain together. This part is always the most difficult—no matter how many times Steve fucks him.

“Is this what you needed?” Steve asks to distract him from the overwhelming stretch. “Are you going to use your Daddy’s cock to make yourself spill all over us?”

Bucky moans long and loud as his ass comes to a stop against the circle of Steve’s fingers where they’re wrapped around himself, just a scant couple of inches down his cock.

“Daddy…” Bucky breathes, body trying to sink further down but unable to overcome Steve’s hand blocking him from doing just that. “I—I want…”

“This is enough for now, baby boy,” Steve coos, kissing across Bucky’s collarbone.

“But I— _oh…”_

Bucky’s words trail off suddenly when he transfers his weight from one knee to the other, causing Steve’s cock to shift inside him. Steve can’t help but grin at the shocked, pleasured expression taking over Bucky’s face.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Steve teases, allowing Bucky to take more of the lead now that the discomfort of first entry appears to have mostly abated.

Bucky nods, his neck moving jerky and sloppy. He rises up until Steve is all the way out again, then sinks back down to the barrier of Steve’s fist.

“So good, Daddy.” He moves again, this time leaning back as he lowers himself down. Steve’s dick must brush over his sweet spot. “Fuck!”

Racy, wet sounds accompany each of Bucky’s self-pleasuring movements; Steve had been generous when he’d applied the lube. He’s just starting to sweat at the self-control it takes to not grab Bucky’s hips and fuck his cock up into his tight, burning body when Bucky starts whimpering again, head thrown back.

 _“Daddy,”_ he whines, looking at Steve with a genuine pout on his face. “Daddy, I wanna have more of you.”

Steve groans and leans forward to take Bucky’s mouth. He makes himself focus on how easily Bucky is taking what he can already before deciding to allow him another inch, sliding his fist down closer to his own balls. Bucky’s dick is wet at the tip, bouncing between his stomach and Steve’s every time he rises and falls.

“There you go, sweetheart,” Steve soothes, drinking in the noises Bucky makes when he finally envelops that extra bit of length. “So fucking sweet for your Daddy.”

They go on like that for some time, slow ups and downs and inexperienced grinding motions that feel almost clumsy—perfect—with Steve letting Bucky take a little bit more every time he so sweetly begs for it. He gets so lost in it that he almost misses Bucky’s face scrunching up in an unpleasant expression when he’s a little more than halfway down Steve’s length. The faint outline of his cock can be seen pressing against Bucky’s lower belly even from the outside.

“Easy,” Steve warns, using his strength to pull Bucky up to a shallower point. “Easy for me. Not so much, I told you—it’s different like this.”

Bucky makes a half-hearted sound of protest, but he doesn’t struggle as Steve situates his fist higher to keep him from sinking back down to that point of discomfort.

“But I wanted to ride you,” he argues, lip trembling. “I wanted to make you feel good.”

“Oh, baby boy…” Steve trails kisses up and down his jawline. “You _are_ riding me. You’re making Daddy feel so good.”

To demonstrate, Steve uses his hold around Bucky’s hips to move him up and down, forward and backward, simulating the same riding motions that Steve knows Bucky has imagined himself doing with Steve’s entire cock snug inside him.

“See?” he husks, tilting his own hips until the angle results in hits against Bucky’s prostate. Steve knows he has it when Bucky lets out a fractured, melodic moan. “Do you see now how perfect you are? You don’t need more than just these few inches to show Daddy how good your body is for him.”

Bucky nods furiously and tightens his grip on Steve’s shoulders. Steve lets him take over again, and this time he seems to accept that this is as much of Steve as he’s going to get inside him in this position—today, at least—and he sets out to find pleasure.

“Oh- _uh,”_ Bucky hiccups, leaning backward in Steve’s arms so he can hit that spot each time he lowers his body. “Oh my God!”

It’s an addictive, mind-bending tease to feel and see Bucky fucking himself over just the tip of Steve’s cock, a dozen different fantasies coming true at once. It only gets better when Bucky seems to forget that he’s not alone in the room, mumbling a slew of nonsensical things and treating Steve’s dick as though it were a toy meant for Bucky to make himself feel good. Steve feels like a wild, enraged beast with how much he wants to tackle Bucky onto the mattress and just _take_ , but he buries face in Bucky’s chest instead, closing his eyes to the feeling of skin heating his lips.

“Wanna come, Daddy,” Bucky whimpers.

 _“Yeah_ , baby. Touch your sweet little cock for me.”

Bucky ends up spilling all over his own fist while Steve holds him, keeping him upright so he can work his wet hole over Steve’s dick for his own pleasure, and it’s the hot clench of his muscles that finally makes Steve lose it. He doesn’t bother to choke away the sound that erupts from his chest—something deep, something guttural, something like an animal—as he swiftly turns sideways so he can lay back flat on the bed, pulling Bucky down with him until they’re both horizontal, skin-to-skin.

Steve crosses his forearm over Bucky’s back, pulling him in tight enough to share sweat and smash their mouths together as he finally allows himself to thrust up into the vise-like grip of his body. It’s an easier angle for Bucky to take than sitting on Steve’s cock, but he still keeps a hand wrapped around the base of his shaft to prevent himself from hammering in too deep and fucking through to depths of Bucky that Steve hasn’t stretched open since last night.

He can tell his boy is sensitive but feeling no less perfect, loose in both body and mind. Bucky keeps making these high-pitched _“ungh, ungh, ungh”_ sounds every time Steve slams in to the point of his self-imposed limit. He can feel himself tumbling towards orgasm at a breathtaking rate.

“Gonna fill you up, baby boy,” Steve growls through gritted teeth. “Gonna pump you full of me.”

It isn’t another thirty seconds after Steve says the words and swallows Bucky’s answering whine that he makes good on his promise, spending his balls near to empty with his cock stuffed inside Bucky’s tight heat. His release isn’t quite the volume it had been the night before, but it’s enough to spill out and cause wet, squelching noises that he knows would scandalize Bucky were his mind any clearer.

“ _Daddy,”_ Bucky whispers instead, his face a relaxed smile written in satisfaction’s blushing ink. “Thank you…”

Steve lets them lie in their bliss for another ten minutes while they come down, Bucky with his full weight on Steve’s chest and stomach and Steve petting Bucky’s soft, damp hair. He whispers quiet refrains of _“I love you”_ that Bucky probably doesn’t hear in his fuzzy, floating state, but Steve lets the words free anyway, unable to contain them in the swollen space between his lungs.

Bucky idly grinds down on Steve’s barely half-soft cock. Steve knows it’s more for feeling and comfort than it is for the pleasures of sex.

“Come on, sweet boy,” he murmurs after a while. “Let me get you nice and clean.”

Steve cannot resist sinking to his knees in his shower, licking rivulets of his own come out of Bucky’s soft and thoroughly loved hole.

—

_“Nooo,”_ Bucky groans, plopping his sandwich down onto the plate. “Is it that time already?”

Steve shoots him a half-grin and finishes crunching on his potato chip.

“Every four weeks,” he answers with a shake of his head. “Gotta send the Extension a monthly sample, even in the winter. We’ve got no idea what’s happening down there otherwise.”

“But it’s so _collld_ , Daddy.”

Steve’s whole body goes stiff as a board—except for his cock, which twitches like mad—but he does his best to hide it.

It’s the first time Bucky has called Steve that name outside of their bedroom dynamic, and it doesn’t even seem like his boy has noticed. He’s busy scrunching up his nose at the idea of going outside in the cold air and picking at his sandwich.

“Stay inside then,” Steve shrugs. “I’ll get the fireplace going. You can stay nice and toasty while _Daddy_ does the work.”

Bucky’s cheeks flush red. Steve knows his repetition of the pet name has made him realize what he said aloud in the first place.

“Nah,” Bucky answers with a hitch in his voice. “And what—? Let you make fun of me later for being a little farm princess?” He picks up his grilled cheese and rolls his eyes dramatically, lips pursed. “As _if…_ But I want your spare work jacket.”

Steve chuckles. “You have your own Carhartt, baby boy. Certainly one that fits you better than mine.”

“I know,” Bucky says. His words are muffled, spoken out of the corner of his mouth while he chews on his bite. “But it’s cold. And I can wear yours on top of mine.”

A groan tries its best to bubble up in Steve’s throat for the second time in less than a minute. This time, it’s the realization that Bucky is actually small enough that his own thick work jacket can fit _inside_ Steve’s, just like a little Russian doll, but he suppresses the sound. Sex noises with food in his mouth would definitely be unattractive—even if it would probably make Bucky giggle.

“Alright,” Steve grins. “Finish up and suit up. We’ve got work to do.”

—

For as cold as it is outside—double digits below freezing in the middle of a late autumn cold snap—a golden sun is out and the magnificent vista of snow blanketing Steve’s land makes leaving the warmth of the indoors worth it. It’s beautiful, but Steve is still thankful their only task today is to collect this month’s progress soil sample; he wouldn’t want Bucky outside in these temperatures for very long.

He’s not overly fond of the cold himself.

“Here you go.” Steve withdraws the post-hole digger out of the ground through six inches of dirt and six inches of snow. Bucky is crouched on the ground beside him. “Ready?”

Bucky nods and flashes the wide-mouthed jar up at him. “Ready.”

Steve lets the extracted soil fall out onto the snow. Bucky diligently collects it into his sample container with gloved hands, packing the amber glass with silt and clay to its brim.

“All done,” he smiles, twisting the lid of the jar shut and handing the sample upwards for Steve to accept. The tip of his nose is so pink Steve wants to kiss it.

He bends down and does just that.

“You’re the best partner I’ve ever had,” Steve murmurs, tugging Bucky to his feet and tucking the jar into his pocket. “Did you know that?”

Bucky’s lips curl up happily against Steve’s mouth. He has to strain on his tip-toes to meet the embrace of the kiss.

“Oh, yeah?” he says. “What kind of partner?”

The sun’s rays wind themselves through Bucky’s coffee-colored locks where they peek out beneath his beanie.

“Everything,” Steve answers honestly. “Business, projects. In bed.” He grins, kissing Bucky’s cheek. “In the kitchen, teaching me how to use the damn spice cabinet.”

Steve gets a breathy, fogged-up giggle in response, followed by a hopeful look.

Careful, storm-gray eyes hone in on his soul.

“Maybe…” Bucky begins. He licks his lips. “Maybe even a partner in life?”

Steve’s heart skips a beat. It skips two.

It’s certainly not the first time he’s imagined the fantasy, not in the least: slipping a ring onto Bucky’s finger, begging him to spend the rest of existence with him, to spend life and grow life straight from their newly abundant ground until they both grow old and wither away in their own time.

Steve tilts his face and presses their foreheads together.

“I sure hope so, sweetheart. Should the universe make me that damn lucky.”

They stand like that in their white winter fields, one of Steve’s hands cupping Bucky’s face while the other rests comfortably on the small of Bucky’s back. Their eyes stay locked on each other’s.

The quiet wind whispers in their ears.

“Well…” Bucky starts, breaking the sweet silence with a mischievous smile. “There’s just one little problem with that.”

Steve can’t help but chuckle out a breath. He presses a soft kiss to Bucky’s lips.

“Is that right?” he grins, playing his game. “And what kind of problem would that be?”

Bucky pulls back a foot and stares up at Steve with a glint in his eye.

“If you want to keep me…” he says, backing away slowly. “You’re gonna have to catch me first.”

And then Bucky takes off in a wild sprint towards the house, kicking up snow as he goes. Steve belly laughs into the wind and lets him run for a good five seconds.

Then Steve chases after him.

It doesn’t take his super speed to catch up, just the reach of Steve’s much longer legs. Bucky squeals with laughter and joy when Steve scoops him up from behind and twists his own body around, letting himself fall onto the young wheat and clover beneath the blanket of snow while Bucky lands on his chest.

 _“Got_ you,” Steve triumphs, victory spoken into Bucky’s wind-whipped cheek.

Bucky giggles even more before turning in Steve’s arms. He straddles him with his knees in the snow.

“Yeah,” he beams down at him, lowering himself against Steve’s chest. “You got me.”

“And does that mean I get to keep you?”

Bucky’s grin grows. It’s like watching a bounty of precious metals multiply before him, silver and gold and all the earth’s riches expanding in spades. He opens his mouth to answer Steve’s question.

The words never get to come out.

The unmistakable sound of an engine—an old one, by the noise of it, a catalytic converter knocking and clacking—comes rattling from around the corner of the house.

Bucky hears it, too. He immediately shoots a concerned look down at Steve.

“Are we expecting anyone?”

Steve shakes his head. “No,” he answers, sitting up and taking Bucky with him so they can rise to their feet. “No, we’re not.”

He brushes the snow from Bucky’s hair and elbows before giving his own jacket a cursory shake-off.

Steve starts towards the front of the house, where the engine can be heard shutting off. He rounds the corner with Bucky in tow to find an old, maroon sedan parked in his driveway. The driver must still be inside.

“I don’t know that car,” he says, holding a hand out behind him to direct Bucky to keep back until they know more about their visitor. Steve keeps his own eyes ahead. “Stay here.”

He’s walked halfway towards the unfamiliar vehicle, shoulders squared, when he hears Bucky calling to him.

“Steve!” he shouts, voice drawing closer. Steve turns to find him running to catch up. “Steve, wait—”

“Stay _back,_ Buck,” Steve warns, stern. “I told you—”

“No, _Steve_ ,” Bucky repeats, voice suddenly shaking. “That’s my father’s car.”

Bucky stops them both in their place, gasping, looking towards the car with his hand curled into Steve’s jacket. Steve rounds his head, a rage like the earth’s iron core suddenly heating him from inside.

He knows with absolute certainty that he is capable of killing someone today.

Steve pulls Bucky to him and kisses the top of his head.

“Please, baby,” he rasps, voice like gravel. “Stay right here. Let me handle this.”

He feels Bucky draw in a deep breath before nodding, the roundness of his head rocking against the underside of Steve’s chin. Steve gives him one final squeeze before pulling away and turning just in time to see the driver stepping out of the car.

It’s not a man at all, but a young, darkly maned woman with braided hair and a thick gray peacoat. She looks straight in their direction.

“Oh my god.” Bucky’s voice is quiet, but Steve's ears catch it regardless.

_“Bucky!”_

And now Steve sees it.

The woman suddenly running towards them has big, bright eyes with the exact same shine in them as Bucky’s. She has a dimple on her square chin and cheekbones that stand out against her otherwise soft features.

She is—beyond a shadow of a doubt—none other than Rebecca Barnes.

“Bucky!” she cries again, closer this time, tears in her gray eyes as she finally makes it to them and throws her arms around her brother. Steve steps back. “I can’t believe it—oh my gosh, _oh my gosh,_ I…”

 _“Becca,”_ Bucky sobs, embracing his sister tightly while Steve looks on. “But, how…”

Steve turns back to the car. He searches, but he sees no sign of a passenger. Becca appears to be alone.

“Your father…” he begins, his voice more cutting than he wants it to sound as he wills his blood to cool. “Your mother. They aren’t with you?”

Becca reluctantly pulls away from Bucky while keeping her hands on his jacket, really looking at Steve for what seems like the first time as she eyes him up and down warily like she’s challenging him to tell her who the hell he is to be asking. She’s even shorter than Bucky, but if she’s intimidated by his comparatively leviathan stature, the expression on her face doesn’t betray it. Steve is thankful she doesn’t seem to recognize him.

“Becca,” Bucky sniffles, nose and eyes red. “This—This is Steve.” He gestures around them with one hand. “This is Steve’s farm.”

Becca scans the field and the exterior of the house, taking in the faded white sideboards and the chipped blue window shutters on the face of an otherwise well-tended home. She doesn’t say anything.

“Are...” Steve can see Bucky’s throat bob with a swallow. “Do Mom and Pops know you’re here?”

Steve wants to ask how she found his farm in the first place, how she knew where to find her brother, but he doesn’t. He’ll save his questions for later—after he knows for sure that his Bucky is safe.

Becca looks back at her brother and blinks, her lips parted. She’s silent for a moment longer.

“Mom’s at home,” she says quietly. “She knows.”

Steve hears what Becca doesn’t say. He knows Bucky hears it, too.

“Oh,” There’s the faintest trembling in Bucky’s voice, and Steve wants to run to him and wrap him up, but he resists. “And Pops?”

The air around them falls again to the lonely sounds of wind, but this time, the silence is audibly charged and static. Something complicated happens on Becca’s face.

And then an intuition Steve did not know he possessed speaks inside him before Becca even opens her mouth. When she does, it only confirms what Steve inexplicably knows already.

“Bucky,” she whispers, voice quiet and perhaps breaking with something. “Pops is dead.”

**|** end _of story_ **f o u r |**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may now proceed to story **f i v e** | _[The Stalk and the Storm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29809440/chapters/73338375)_ |

**Author's Note:**

> Your comments and kudos and shares [ [tumblr](https://the1918.tumblr.com/post/638392416048693248/the-farmer-daddy-steve-and-bucky-au-series-by) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/the1918Lynne/status/1348019180533112836?s=20) ] water farmer Steve's crops ❤
> 
> Thank you again to [ixalit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ixalit) for beta and to Cera ([@ceratonia-siliqua](https://ceratonia-siliqua.tumblr.com/) or [Leopardtail](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leopardtail) on Ao3) for additional sensitivity reading. Also thank you to [Becassine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/becassine) and all of the Shrunkyclunks BitchesTM for providing support and the always necessary hype.


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